Do speech therapists and reading interventionists work together in your school? Students benefit greatly when these specialists collaborate, and Read Naturally’s phonemic awareness program, Funēmics®, is an ideal tool to facilitate the partnership.

Speech therapists have traditionally led the way in phonemic awareness. They know this skill is essential to success, not only in speech, but also in reading, writing, and spelling. For years, speech therapists have been diligently working with their younger students to help those students master word awareness, syllable awareness, rhyming, and sound awareness. After all, over 90% of students served by speech therapists come with articulation/phonological disorders.

These are the students who will benefit most from Read Naturally’s Funēmics. Research shows that teaching phonemic awareness as an intervention has better results when done alongside other reading instruction. Read Naturally designed Funēmics to work independently of a student’s writing skills, so Funēmics can seamlessly complement any reading curriculum or reading intervention. Using Funēmics in a speech therapy setting will not only lead to more success in speech, but it will enhance the student’s ability to learn in reading.

The benefits of using Funēmics in a speech therapy setting include:

  • The speech therapy setting can positively impact the reading intervention setting and vice versa.
  • Reading achievement can accelerate for students who have deficits in both speech and reading.
  • The student’s speech and reading teachers are more aligned, thus allowing the student to progress more efficiently.

Funēmics consists of 59 scripted, research-based lessons that take students from the very basics of word awareness to the more complex skills of phoneme manipulation. Funēmics is scaffolded to ensure mastery and independence at every stage, making the teaching of each skill concrete and straightforward.

Funēmics aligns with the overarching strategies proven to effectively teach phonological awareness skills to students with language disorders (Louisiana Department of Education, 2002, p. 21).

  1. The lessons are brief, lasting 15-20 minutes—perfect for a language session.
  2. Funēmics is scripted to ensure the concepts are explicitly taught and uses research-based practices to systematically teach each of the six outcomes in the phonological awareness continuum.
  3. Progressing from easiest to most difficult, the six Lesson Guides in the Funēmics program teach the six outcomes in the continuum of phonological awareness in sequential order. 
  4. The Funēmics lessons are all done orally. Funēmics breaks instruction into small units and provides modeling, group responses, and individual and group practice and repetition. Supports decrease over time as students reach mastery of the small units of material.

In addition, Funēmics is entirely pre-grapheme, which makes it the perfect instructional tool to precede or supplement any core reading program and the ideal program for a speech therapist to use to support reading instruction.

Want to learn more? Check out this informative and free webcast about Funēmics, or click here to see the product page on Read Naturally’s website.