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Take Flight/Dyslexia Services Boles Middle School and High School

Dyslexia Word Image

 

With a recommendation from an ARD committee, students at Boles Middle School and Boles High School who are identified with dyslexia may receive instruction utilizing the Take Flight program from the campus dyslexia specialist.  These classes take the place of one elective during their school day.  

 

 

WHAT IS TAKE FLIGHT?

Take Flight is a comprehensive intervention for students with dyslexia. It is a two-to-four year Orton-Gillingham based curriculum written by the staff of the Luke Waites Center for Dyslexia and Learning Disorders at Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children in Dallas. Take Flight is a curriculum that is evidence-based and backed by research.

Take Flight is based on the pioneering research of Dr. Samuel T. Orton, neuropsychiatrist, and the educational and psychological insights of Anna Gillingham.  The Orton-Gillingham techniques for children lacking a talent for language became the basis of a pilot from 1965-1975 at the Language Laboratory at Texas Scottish Rite Hospital in Dallas, TX.  An interdisciplinary team worked to incorporate multisensory teaching techniques, current findings in learning theories, and discovery teaching into the Take Flight curriculum.

School Pencil | The Written Word Center for Dyslexia and Learning

What makes Take Flight an effective intervention?

Take Flight addresses the five components of effective reading instruction identified by the National Reading Panel’s research and is a comprehensive Tier III intervention for students with dyslexia.

 

What are the 5 components of effective reading instruction?

  • Phonemic Awareness – Follows established procedures for explicitly teaching the relationships between speech-sound production and spelling-sound patterns.
  • Phonics – Provides a systematic approach to single word decoding. Students learn 96 grapheme-phoneme correspondences.
  • Fluency – Uses research-proven directed practice in repeated reading of words, phrases, and passages to help students read a newly encountered text more fluently.
  • Vocabulary – Features multiple word learning strategies (definitional, structural, contextual) and explicit teaching techniques with application in the text.  Students learn 87 affixes with an emphasis on English morphology.  Students learn Latin roots and Greek combining forms.
  • Reading Comprehension – Teaches students to explicitly use and articulate multiple comprehension strategies for narrative and expository text.

 

School Pencil | The Written Word Center for Dyslexia and Learning

Who can implement Take Flight?

Take Flight is designed for use by a Certified Academic Language Therapist (or Therapist in Training) for children with dyslexia ages 7 and older. For children younger than 7 years of age, the curriculum called Pre Flight is used for intervention.

 

What is a Certified Academic Language Therapist?

Certified Academic Language Therapists (CALT) are specially trained to work with students with dyslexia and related language-based learning differences. They have completed extensive training in multisensory structured language at a training center or university program that is accredited by IMSLEC (International Multisensory Structured Language Education Council).

 

Therapy level standards require a CALT to:

  • Hold a bachelor’s degree in education or a related field.
  • Complete 220 course contact hours in an accredited learning therapy program.
  • Complete a minimum of 700 clinical teaching hours.
  • Complete 10 demonstration lessons.
  • Successfully pass The Alliance National Registration exam for Multisensory Structured Language Education.  Passing the exam qualifies an individual to be a Certified Academic Language Therapist.

 

School Pencil | The Written Word Center for Dyslexia and Learning

How is structured literacy taught?

  • Simultaneous and Multisensory – In order to enhance learning and memory, all learning pathways in the brain (visual – auditory – kinesthetic – tactile) are engaged simultaneously.
  • Systematic and Cumulative – Organization of the material follows the logical order of the English language. Instruction begins with the most simple elements and progresses to the most difficult concepts. Each lesson is built on the previous concept learned and content is regularly reviewed to enhance retention.
  • Direct Instruction – Multisensory language instruction includes the direct teaching of all concepts. The therapist does not assume students have learned all of the skills.
  • Diagnostic Teaching- The instructional plan for every student is based on continuous assessment of individual needs with the goal of content being mastered to the degree of automaticity.
  • Synthetic and Analytic Instruction – Synthetic instruction presents the parts of the language and how they work together to form a whole. Analytic instruction presents the whole of language and demonstrates how it can be broken down into parts.

 

How often do students receive instruction?

The two-year program is taught 5 days a week ( 45 minutes per day) or four days per week (60 minutes per day) and is intended for small group instruction for 1-6 students. Take Flight includes 132 lessons with a total of 230 hours of direct instruction.