Making the Grade
Intensive "Phonetics" Guidance While You Are in the Process of Reading
The “Magic Ladder” technology brings all words and letters “to life,” and they behave like “one-on-one tutors” for the reader.
With “PQs,” letters and words are coupled with both “letter-sound-outs” and a revolutionary visual feature that, together, assist with decoding word recognition in a highly neurologically efficient way.
At the end of each lesson module, phonetics-building reading activity is also present, with letter-sound-spelling exposures intentionally ordered and built upon, based largely on a merger of the Kathy Ganske Word Journeys research and the highly-vetted DIBELS ® phonetics assessment process.
In addition to each lesson module’s phonetics readings, AOCR ® also provides two additional comprehensive read-along activity sets for those students needing more practice with the challenges of learning to decode, one being a phonics Scope & Sequence, the other a Letter-Sound-Spelling Resolver.
Processes in Place to Assure that Students Continue to Build Their Vocabularies at All Grade Levels, so that they Never Again Skip Over and / or Guess at Words
First, in the Magic Ladder word-pop-up boxes, one can access instantaneous definitions, synonyms, word origins, and translations (via “Word Explore”), presented for each word as an additional powerful learning aid.
Second, at the beginning of every single lesson — throughout the curriculum — all new words (bounced against cumulative prior-word exposures) are presented for oral pre-teaching by the educator.
All Subjects Except for Math are Covered, Driven Largely by the Now-Online Inclusion of the Highly Respected Free Core Knowledge ® ("CKLA") Curriculum
Reading science shows us that an imperative factor in becoming a great reader is being exposed to a well-scaffolded, broad-domain-knowledge curriculum that includes lots of “social studies.”
AOCR ® covers such a broad range of topics, including literature, poetry, history, geography, social studies, civics, government, personal health, world cultures, and multiple sciences.
Core Knowledge ® has built their powerful content over decades, and they have intentionally designed subject matter from an earlier grade to be covered again in a later grade, thus diving even more deeply into that topic.
Through our current 4th-grade completion point, AOCR ® generates a 26,000+ Unique-Word Vocabulary in a Very Gently Ramped Complexity-Build, Specially Designed for Success for our Earliest Readers (Grades K / 1 / 2)
Statistics available at AOCR ®’s site will demonstrate how we have designed word exposures to be at lower average word-letter and number-of-syllable lengths in the earliest grades, while building vocabulary at a much faster rate than traditionally occurs.
Estimates vary widely about how many words people know, and about how a “word” is “defined.” AOCR ®’s research suggests that the best estimate of an average adult’s written-word vocabulary inventory is probably somewhere between 40,000 to 50,000 words.
AOCR ® defines a “word,” to be very clear and simple (many linguists may disagree), as a “unique spelling” — “its” is a different word than “it’s” — the way that we define a “word.”
AOCR ® found much research leading to a suggestion that a higher-education-level reader might know up to 80,000 words, but that this number might be based on a “root word” count. Thus, we bumped our college-readiness target up to 100,000 uniquely spelled words.
In addition to a massive word-count target, AOCR ® has also tracked its vocabulary against over 50 iconic word lists to ensure that higher-frequency words are mostly exposed (95% target) to students by the end of 5th-grade.
Leave 12th-Grade Reading at a "16th-grade" Freshman College Readiness Level
Around 30% of U.S. Freshman college students drop out before their sophomore year; the total dropout rate for U.S. undergrads is 40%; less than 30% of community college students earn a two-year degree.
MetaMetrics ®, the developer of the highly-used grade leveler, Lexile ®, determined at some point that their initially calculated “average 12th-grade” leveling was “four grade-levels lower” than than reading capability expectations for a college freshman.
AOCR ®’s eventual goal is to make sure that the high school grade level ramp that it calculates — with its proprietary multiple-grade-leveler algorithm — will prepare an exiting 12th-grader to be reading at “16th-grade level.”
Instantaneous Real-Time Intervention with Word Pronunciation ("Recognition") and Word Meaning ("Understanding") Needs
Revolutionary “PQs” (“pronunciation clues”) technology is an on-demand one-on-one “tutor” that assists the reader with the decoding and pronunciation of words.
The “PQs” “tutor” makes independent reading less reliant on difficult-to-scale-to intensive one-on-one personal instruction and provides for more effective instantaneous word assistance during both independent reading time or classroom instruction time (especially with a Smart Board).
AOCR ®’s online digital format makes learning to read possible wherever the reader may be, in the classroom, at home, or on-the-go, even completely accessible via a cell phone.
AOCR ® blends content and technology in a radically new way — entirely based on “the science-of-reading” — to create a groundbreaking learning-to-read-experience.
AnyOneCanRead® (“AOCR”) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky aiming to help improve U.S. literacy rates by developing a learning-to-read experience that is powered by reading science best practices.