For younger students, the program provides the kind of structure and systemic lessons that beginning readers need. For older students, the SIPPS program uses age-appropriate reading materials that help them acquire the skills they must have to read grade-level texts and understand content-level vocabulary.
The SIPPS program also incorporates the best practices for teaching English Language Learners and provides follow-up support and professional development for teachers.
Mentors work with students in small groups to build word recognition, spelling, fluency, and comprehension skills. Here’s how the program works.
FOUR UNIQUE ASPECTS OF THE SIPPS PROGRAM:
- Systematic Instruction: Instruction is guided by a scope and sequence. Mentors use direct instruction and modeling to introduce critical content, to guide student practice, and to apply the lesson to reading and writing.
- Mastery Learning: The program requires that students achieve 80 percent mastery before moving to the next lesson. In the first two levels, mastery tests are included in the lessons. More informal assessment is used in the Challenge Level. Each lesson includes extra content so teachers can review or reteach with fresh material.
- Use of “Hybrid Text”: The beginning stories repeat sentence patterns and include lesson sight words. As students learn more phonics, the stories use a mix of decodable words and sight words.
- Polysyllabic Strategies: The program provides both strategies for decoding longer words and help in applying those strategies to reading. It also provides extensive word lists as well as instruction on regular and irregular sight syllables and commonly used Latin prefixes, suffixes, and roots.