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ABeCeDarian Reading Program

Overview

Abecedarian is an exemplary program for teaching students reading, letter formation, and spelling. Abecedarian is a research-based spelling and decoding program. The program addresses the areas of phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency. The comprehensive and straightforward organization of the program make ABeCeDarian an excellent choice for home-schoolers.

The ABeCeDarian Reading Program doesn't attempt to provide radically new teaching techniques, but it does offer unparalleled efficiency in helping students develop into fluent and accomplished readers.

ABeCeDarian achieves efficiency in the following ways:

• It focuses only on essential skills and knowledge
• It provides the right kind and right amount of practice
• It provides precise and productive error correction

Unlike most other phonics programs, which start with letters and present what sounds go with the letters, ABeCeDarian organizes all of its instruction by sound and shows how sounds are represented by letters. This distinction may seem quite abstract and subtle at first, but it is really quite significant. Students at the very beginning of most other programs must spend time learning what sounds go with what letters. Only after they have mastered some of these correspondences are they introduced to words. In ABeCeDarian, in contrast, the beginning readers start right off by spelling simple words like "mop" and "sat." They hear words that they are familiar with and learn how, with their teacher's help, to break these words into individual sounds as well as what letters are used to represent these sounds.

Key Features

• Explicit, comprehensive multisensory phonics instruction
• Sound blending and segmenting explicitly taught and practiced
• Letter/Sound correspondences taught in the context of reading and spelling words
• Letter sounds taught before letter names
• Code knowledge organized by sounds with engaging sorting activities
• No rules!
• Precise practice routines and error correction procedures
• Integrated handwriting and spelling instruction
• Expert oral reading fluency practice

Structure

ABeCeDarian is divided into three levels:

1. Level A: for non-readers or very beginning readers
2. Level B: for students at mid-first grade through second grade level
3. Level C: for students at third and fourth grade level

We know that many gifted students are advanced readers so we recommend beginning Level A in preschool or with our 5-7 program and continuing through the levels until your child completes the program.

Below is a more detailed scope and sequence that describes the skills covered at each level of the AbeCeDarian Program.

Level A
Level A is for non-readers or very beginning readers such as kindergartners or beginning first grade students. Each lesson combines:

• sound blending
• sound segmenting
• learning letter/sound correspondences
• handwriting instruction
• reading and spelling words.

Level B

• multiple-letter vowel spellings (oa, ee, eigh, etc.)
• past tense ending -ed
• simple yet effective techniques to read two-, three-, and four-syllable words

Level C

• English and Latin prefixes, suffixes, and root words
• Exercises to help students read and spell these words easily as well as to learn their meanings
• Advanced spelling patterns

Recommendations For Using With Moving Beyond the Page

Curriculum Samples
ABeCeDarian Reading
Level A
Student Reading Book A1
	ABeCeDarian Level A Reading Book Sample
Student Workbook A1
	ABeCeDarian Level A Workbook Sample
Level B
Student Workbook B1
	ABeCeDarian Level B Workbook Sample
Level C
Student Workbook C
	ABeCeDarian Level C Workbook Sample