Wilson Reading Games

I started teaching a neat phonics/reading fluency program last month called the Wilson Reading System after going through a 3-day training. Wilson is part of a suite of products from Wilson Language Training including Fundations and Just Words. Currently, we use Fundations for our PK-3rd grade classrooms at my school and Just Words for about half of our 4th graders who need additional reading support. Wilson is a Tier 3 small group intervention for students who typically have dyslexia and can be taught from third grade through adulthood. 

My Wilson group is a mix of third and fourth graders and 75% of them have a diagnosed reading specific learning disability. All Wilson groups start at the same spot regardless of past reading achievement or exposure. The lessons are highly repetitive and unfortunately cannot be planned more than a day in advance (two things I strongly dislike as a teacher). I figured my students would hate the repetitive nature of each lesson (because I won't lie it's not my most fun class to plan), but it's actually been a good reminder that content can be made fun no matter what it is as long as you believe in what you are teaching, have some good classroom management skills, and establish a fun classroom culture. 

In Wilson, we do a lot of reading "Dick and Jane" type sentences and passages. The first time I read these I wanted to stab my eyes out, but then a student had the great idea to act out one of the sentences: Jim had a cut on his leg. You can only imagine the impressive war wounds Jim experienced. Now we end up reading these sentences over and over through doing things like charades (you can't win unless you have perfect fluency) and partner interpretive reading. 

We also have a Wilson Friday Game Day (encouraged by the founders of Wilson actually) where I have been introducing a different game each week to go along with the step we are on. I have so far been able to find a lot of great games on the FCRR website that align closely to our objectives. I will post the games I find for other teachers to use in case they find them helpful. Here are my games so far. These have all been tried and approved by my group: 

General/Sight Words

• Word Fishing
• Sight Word Checkers

1.3: Students learn all the short vowel sounds, consonants, and the digraphs of th, sh, wh, ch, and ck. 

I used several of my different short vowel phonics games. I'll post more specifics later, but these were things I already had on the shelf. 

1.4: Students learn that they should double the final l, s, and f in words with short vowels. Example: miss, fill, staff. They also learn about the welded sound -all. Example: ball. 

• Knoll Stroll

1.5: Students learn about the welded sounds -an and -am. Example: ham, pan. 

• I am currently on this substep and haven't found a great game yet. However, I am going to have students make welded sound paint chip decks because I will be adding many more welded sounds in the next few weeks, and I think they will get a kick out of making their own set and creating their own real and nonsense words. Afterwards we will play our previous games for review. Here's the picture I found on Pinterest for the welded sound activity inspiration: ​