ABOUT TAKE FLIGHT

Take Flight: A Comprehensive Intervention for Students with Dyslexia is a curriculum written by the staff of the Luke Waites Center for Dyslexia and Learning Disorders of Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children (TSRHC). Take Flight builds on the success of the three previous dyslexia intervention programs developed by the staff of TSRHC: Alphabetic Phonics, the Dyslexia Training Program and TSRH Literacy Program.  The curriculum was designed for use by academic language therapists with children 7 years and older who have developmental dyslexia.  It was developed to enable students with dyslexia to achieve and maintain better word recognition, reading fluency, reading comprehension and aid in the transition from a therapy setting to “real world” learning.  Recent reading intervention studies, including data collected at TSRHC, were the impetus for writing Take Flight and have contributed to its design.  Teaching trials in the TSRHC Dyslexia Laboratory and trials by therapists in collaborating public schools also influenced curriculum revision.

Take Flight contains the five components of effective reading instruction supported by the National Reading Panel research meta-analysis and mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act:

         Phonemic awareness in Take Flight includes a systematic exploration of the articulation of phonemes and is fully integrated within decoding and spelling instruction.

         All phoneme-grapheme correspondence rules are introduced over a shorter time than previous TSRHC programs, allowing time for practice toward accuracy and automaticity in the application of phonic skills and for more guided reading practice with controlled and regular text.  Also, there is an expanded use of etymology in teaching word analysis strategies.

         Vocabulary is expanded and enriched by developing morphological knowledge, word relationships, figurative language, syntax and semantics by direct instruction and in the context of reading.

         Fluency instruction incorporates guided and timed repeated reading of decodable words, phrases and connected text.  Incentives, concrete measures of progress and daily home practice are also important elements of fluency training.

         A combination of techniques is used for instruction in reading comprehension, including comprehension monitoring, question generation, story structure, summarizing and inferencing.  Students also learn how to utilize graphic and semantic organizers when reading narrative and expository texts.

Each of the five components is presented in the seven books of Take Flight. Figure 1 shows when each component is taught within the curriculum.