MAKE AN IMPACT

The Ontario Human Rights Commission Right to Read Inquiry Report was a wake up call for educators.

If you are in a leadership role, you have the power to make a positive change in the lives of countless children and their families.

How I Can Read in French can help:

Workshops

We offer a series of virtual workshops in which we introduce teachers to the science of reading and structured literacy. Specific topics include phonemic awareness, phonics, and effective sound wall implementation. Contact us to schedule your first workshop.

Phonemic Awareness

An essential skill in learning to read is being able to blend, segment, and manipulate the sounds in words. For our French Phonemic Awareness books, visit phonemique.ca.

Phonics Program

This systematic and explicit phonics program for teachers in French language classrooms progresses incrementally through a carefully designed Scope & Sequence. Included are slides, workbooks, and guidelines for lesson planning. As of September 2022, this program has been updated to include a Teacher’s Guide with sample scripts and lesson outlines.

To purchase the Phonics Program for your school or board, contact us. Free samples are available here.

Sound Wall

This Sound Wall helps students connect various graphemes - such as è, ai or ei - to their common phoneme - le son /è/. As of September 2022, this program has been updated to include a Teacher’s Guide to assist with implementation.

To purchase the Sound Wall for your school or board, contact us. Free samples are available here.

Pricing for Schools and Boards

Purchasing for multiple teachers? We would be happy to offer you a discount. Our pricing will depend on the number of staff using our programs. For an Estimate, please contact us and let us know:

  1. The specific resources you would like to purchase: The Phonics Program, Sound Wall, and/or Pratique phonémique.

  2. The approximate number of teachers who would be accessing these resources.

To improve literacy rates in your school board, consider…

  • Teacher Training

    The best resources in the world will not effect change unless teachers understand how to use them . I Can Read in French and Pratique phonémique offer workshops for teachers. Our resources also present teachers with the knowledge necessary to get started. But this is just the beginning!

  • Teacher Training - English

    The science of reading is cross-linguistic, meaning training done in English will apply to teaching reading and writing in French. We recommend:

    Basics of Decoding and Spelling

    Introduction to Structured Literacy

    AIM Pathways

  • Teacher Training - French

    Il y a de plus en plus de formations à la science de la lecture disponibles en français. Nous suggérons :

    Des fondements progressifs pour la réussite en lecture et en écriture

    Lexie & Graphie

  • Screening and Progress Monitoring

    Is your board/school using a valid and reliable published screener? These screeners, such as IDAPEL, are essential for identifying at-risk students. Children who are screened in early years can be given the appropriate supports before the gaps between capable and struggling readers starts to feel insurmountable. Progress monitoring lets us know if our approach is working.

  • Goodbye, 3 Cueing System

    Looking at the picture or guessing based on what makes sense are not what good readers do. These strategies in fact hinder the learning process. Students learning to read need evidence-based teaching methods to support their development of orthographic mapping, i.e., “the formation of letter-sound connections to bond the spellings, pronunciations, and meanings of specific words in memory.” - Ehri, 2014

  • Make Literacy a Priority

    Is your resource program bursting at the seams because homeroom teachers are not properly trained in structured literacy? Are resource/special education teachers given adequate time with at-risk students? For more information, contact The International Dyslexia Association or The Reading League for expert guidance on making systemic change, and be sure to watch Dr. Stephanie Stollar’s webinar, Multi-Tiered Systems of Support.

FAQ: Are these materials research-based?

This is one of the most common questions we are asked. The I Can Read in French Phonics Program, Sound Wall, as well as Pratique phonémique, use methodologies recommended by the body of research commonly referred to as ‘the science of reading.’ We use evidence-based approaches and adapt them to a French Immersion context.

We know from decades of research that systematic, direct instruction in skills such as phonemic awareness, phonics, and vocabulary building, as well as opportunities to read decodable texts, are the most effective instructional methods for teaching young students to read. For many students, they are the ONLY methods by which they will learn to read.

To claim that our programs themselves have been researched would not be accurate. This would require a large data set of students done over several years. I Can Read in French is not an academic research team - although if anyone in academia or publishing wished to test our programs on a larger, more formalized scale, we would be thrilled!