Using the word cracker for intensive tier 3 intervention

Tier 3 Intervention

Tier 3 students are those who experience challenges with their literacy development. Generally, these students are taught in a 1-1 or 1-2 teaching ratio. These students are typically slow decoders due to their underlying difficulties. They require the depth and the detail when learning a new teaching point and will often require many more revision activities for their learning to become secure.

A Tier 3 student will greatly benefit from morphological training. It will ease the load on working memory as regularly used affixes become orthographically mapped allowing the student to work on decoding the trickier parts of the word.

Similarly, spelling will become less of a mystery to the struggling student as they learn to encode words by unpacking the morphemes within them.

WORDCRACKER MEMBERSHIP provides a summary of the Playberry™ spelling rules that relate to suffixing and offers guidance about how the Word Cracker can be used to teach and revise these rules.

Although this summary is directly related to the PLAYBERRY™ PROGRAM, the similarity in scope and sequence between most high-level intervention programs means it is a valuable sequence of important spelling suffixing rules for anybody teaching morphology and spelling.

Designed for tier three students

When we decided to make the Word Cracker as a board with magnets, we had our PLAYBERRY™ tier three students in mind. We wanted a multisensory resource that would make the teaching of the morphology component of PLAYBERRY™ tier three come to life. It worked! Now we never teach a new prefix, suffix or related spelling rule without taking students to ‘The Cracker’ to write in a base or root or slide a prefix or suffix in and out to make words.

The colour coding of the suffixes (red for vowel suffixes and blue for consonant suffixes) is a way of alerting student(s) to the important differences between vowel suffixes and consonant suffixes. Red is associated with danger! Student(s) in the Playberry™ program learn to be cautious (beware) when adding vowel suffixes to base words because some of the trickiest English spelling rules are to do with the changes that need to be made to base words when adding vowel suffixes; such as the 111 doubling rule, the drop ‘e’ rule or the change ‘y’ to ‘i’ rule.

Word Cracker's genesis is in intervention

The Word Cracker’s roots (no pun intended) are firmly in intervention. However, we wanted all students to be able to benefit from the Word Cracker.

The Word Cracker is a valuable tool for teaching spelling rules that are taught at various teaching points (TPs) in and as a general sequence for tier 3 intervention.

The colour coding of the suffixes (red for vowel suffixes and blue for consonant suffixes) is a way of alerting student(s) to the important differences between vowel suffixes and consonant suffixes. Red is associated with danger! Student(s) in the Playberry™ program learn to be cautious (beware) when adding vowel suffixes to base words because some of the trickiest English spelling rules are to do with the changes that need to be made to bases when adding vowel suffixes; such as the 111 doubling rule, the drop ‘e’ rule or the change ‘y’ to ‘i’ rule.

Tier 3 students typically require multiple exposures to new material. Using the Word Cracker, along with the supplementary materials which are provided, will benefit the student’s retention.

These include:
• Blank Cracker for recording new affixes when they have been introduced
• Blank crackers for spelling practice
• Games for revising Grammar concepts
• Add, Double, Drop, Change chart for spelling rules

Tier 3 teaching sequence

The Word Cracker has a suggested suffix, prefix and spelling rules sequence with detailed lesson instructions and presets built into the interactive word cracker for each teaching point.

The lesson instructions below are available to members, which means you have more time to focus on teaching and less time on preparation.