Rainbow Phonics is an explicit and systematic program for teaching reading and spelling. It comes from pioneering work in the development of a scope and sequence and decodable books to support this progression, which started some 20 years ago before it became mainstream.
Rainbow Phonics is also based on scientific evidence. We have worked with pilot schools and test schools to refine the program and training so that it can be most effective for students. We have assessed the performance of students and seen outstanding results in reading, decoding, phonemic awareness, and spelling schools. Importantly, we have also analyzed the performance of dyslexic students and observed what we believe to be a rewiring of their brains as they develop their reading skills and fluency.
Rainbow Phonics works because it is grounded in the Science of Reading. Rainbow Phonics follows a clear scope and sequence, both for introducing letter patterns, and also for introducing heart words (or tricky words). Whole class teaching introduces new letter patterns and consolidates learning with teacher-led activities. Newly developing decoding skills are then applied into read contextual reading with decodable text. Together, the Rainbow Phonics method builds phonemic awareness, grapheme-to-phoneme knowledge and lexical access, with the ultimate goal of developing fluent and independent readers.
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