Take Flight: A Comprehensive Intervention for Students with Dyslexia

Take Flight: A Comprehensive Intervention for Students with Dyslexia is a two-year curriculum written by the staff of the Luke Waites Center for Dyslexia and Learning Disorders at Scottish Rite for Children. Take Flight builds on the success of the three previous dyslexia intervention programs developed by the staff of Scottish Rite for Children:

• Alphabetic Phonics
• The Dyslexia Training Program
• Scottish Rite for Children Literacy Program.

• Children with dyslexia seven years and older.
• One-on-one or small group instruction (no more than six students).
• Use by a Certified Academic Language Therapist.
• Four days per week for 60 minutes per day for two years

             or

• Five days per week for 45 minutes per day for two years

Take Flight contains the five components of effective reading instruction identified by research from the National Reading Panel. Take Flight addresses each component by:

• Phonemic Awareness – following established procedures for explicitly teaching the relationships between speech-sound production and spelling-sound patterns.
• Phonics – providing a systematic approach for single-word decoding.
• Fluency – using research-proven, directed practice in repeated reading of words, phrases and passages to help individuals read newly encountered text more fluently.
• Vocabulary – featuring multiple word learning strategies (definitional, structural, contextual) and explicit teaching techniques with application in text.
• Reading Comprehension – teaching students to explicitly use and articulate multiple comprehension strategies (i.e., cooperative learning, story structure, question generation and answering, summarization and comprehension monitoring)

• Students that complete Take Flight instruction show significant growth in all areas of reading skill.
• Follow-up research on children who completed treatment indicates that students maintain the benefits of instruction on word reading skills and continue to improve in reading comprehension after one year.
• Take Flight is effective when used in schools by teachers with advanced training in treating learning disorders.
• Students with the lowest reading skills acquire the strongest gains from Take Flight instruction.