Customer Reviews

Road to the Code: A Phonological Awareness Program for Young Children

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The Road to the Code Program is a wonderful program in helping kindergarten and at-risk first graders in decoding short vowel words. I am a kindergarten teacher teaching in a title 1 school where half of my students are English language learners. All my kindergarten students learned to read words using this program, regardless of their primary language. I have been using this book for 4 years.
This program is easy to implemet. A teacher or trained aide will work with a group of 4 children for a 15 minute lesson. Road to the Code teaches children letter/sound corespondence, how to blend letters, and read words. This program WORKS and children find it fun and are successful. It is the BEST early intervention reading program on the market today. This book is a great investment for you emergent readers!

As a teacher of reading I thought that this book has excellent applications of phonemic awareness. It is very easy to understand and to follow. For the child who is at risk, this book starts out at the very beginning of reading aquisition. I would suggest this book to anyone who is working with a low lovel reader!

Road to the Code is just loaded with information and ideas for use in the classroom. Begins at the beginning with phonological awareness activities and prodeeds forward. Great source for instruction and differentiation. Super !!!

I am the parent of a 9 yo 3rd grader, recently diagnosed as dyslexic. Unable to get appropriate help from the school district, I have a tutor I am working with who suggested I use Road to the Code to help with phonemic awareness. It was very easy to follow and I was surprised how much my older child actually enjoyed the games. He recently finished the last lesson as has made significant progress with his short vowel sounds and letter recognition. He is also beginning to understand there is a logical "code" to attack words with. There is practically no skipping around a paragraph, looking for a "clue", like he was doing prior to this instruction. Now that he is on to more advanced curriculum, he sometimes asks to do some of the "Road to the Code" exercises for fun. I will definately use this program with my (non-dyslexic) kindergartener. The use of only the 8 most frequently used letters, the repetition, and variety of exercises are highly effective and simple. All materials are very low cost and easy to make. I wish they would have used this for him in kindergarten!!!!!

I think this is a great program for teaching phonemic awareness. It has almost everything that you need. I would recommend it to anyone working with young children or those with special needs that are struggling with reading readiness.

Words Aren't Fair

By Martha J. Biery

For a number of summers now, we have given a short course (summer camp) to beginning readers who are struggling a little with phonics. This book, Road to the Code, is the basis of our curriculum. I especially like the manipulative aspect of it. Having the child see where a letter/sound is in a word and then learn how to manipulate that letter/sound is a core skill needed to become a reader. In fact, research supports the fact that children need to process the letters/sounds in words both visually and auditorily in order to store the resulting words in long term memory.

Road to the Code is very user-friendly. It is well written and organized in the proper sequence to ensure success for the reader. There are many spin-off activities. The children love the fact that they can make their own booklet that charts their progress as they intergrate what they learn and try to generalize the information into reading phonics booklets and other appropriate material.

I am a Reading Specialist and certified Reading Recovery teacher. I find this to be an excellent resource for helping Kinder. and beginning 1st graders (can move at a faster pace) develop phonemic awareness. I use this 4 days a week with a group of three 1st graders who have been identified to be most at-risk for reading failure (NOTE: I did NOT use DIEBELS to assess. DIEBELS only screens and it's scores are based solely on the speed in which a child can supply answers. Not enough information if you want to teach children to recognize their strengths and become strategic readers and writers. In fact, DIEBELS does not even consider a child's ability to encode words onto a page. I got all the info I needed from Marie Clay's Observation Survey, CLEF, last year's teacher, and current classroom teacher).

We begin our time together with Road to the Code and then move into some quick "extensions/reviews" (hands-on activities, phonem. aware. based songs or poems, etc.), followed by a guided reading lesson that is Reading Recovery based (this of course includes independent and share-the-pen writing). This gives the children an authenic opportunity to apply what's been learned in Rode to the Code.

It is very well organized and these ladies REALLY know what they are "talking" about!

Benita Blachman works with others in ROAD TO THE CODE: A PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS PROGRAM FOR YOUNG CHILDREN. Spiral binding lends to lay-flat usage in a successful, 11-week program for teaching phonemic awareness and letter/sound correspondence. Reproducible materials make this an easy program for teachers to use, and the format lends easily to their reproduction.

I am impressed by the organization of this phonological awareness program. I have just started using it with Kindergarten children who need more help developing PA. They love the game-like, quick exercises and are learning the difference between a sound and a letter name. I use a dolphin puppet for Fix-it which the children look forward to seeing every time we meet.

Rode to the Code gave me a great program on how to help my struggling students with phonemic awareness. Over time, these students began to understand the big picture of what reading is all about. We are matching letters and sounds and recognizing rhyming words and rhyming word parts. Thank you Rode to the Code!