The dyslexia program offered at F.S.I.S.D is Take Flight: A Comprehensive Intervention for Students with Dyslexia, a curriculum written by the staff of the Luke Waites Center for Dyslexia and Learning Disorders of Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children (TSRHC). This curriculum was designed for use by academic language therapists with children 7 years and older who have developmental dyslexia. It was developed to enable students with dyslexia to achieve and maintain better word recognition, reading fluency, reading comprehension and aid in the transition from a therapy setting to “real world” learning.
Take Flight contains the five components of effective reading instruction supported by the National Reading Panel research meta-analysis and mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act: Phonemic Awareness, Phonic Skills, Vocabulary, Fluency, and Reading Comprehension.
With Take Flight, students will learn all 44 phonemes of the English language, 96 grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules and 87 affixes. The students will also learn spelling rules for base words and derivatives. Practice opportunities are also provided that are designed to improve oral reading fluency. Finally, Take Flight introduces comprehension and vocabulary building strategies for both narrative and expository text in the context of oral reading exercises, preparing students for successful, independent reading.
Students struggling with some or all of the many facets of reading, writing and/or spelling are provided specialized assessment in order to determine if a student may be identified as a student with dyslexia. The difficulty of the child identified as having dyslexia is in reading, single-word decoding, reading fluency, reading comprehension, written composition, and spelling. Those students who are identified are provided with 45 minutes to 1 hour of dyslexia therapy 4 to 5 days a week.