Really Great Reading's Blast Foundations™
In just 15 minutes a day, 5 days a week for only 25 weeks build the important and lifelong foundations needed for all future academic success. Blast Foundations is a phonics and phonemic awareness supplemental program with hands-on multisensory and manipulative based instruction.
Supplemental Instruction - 1st grade - Prevention, Tier 1, whole class instruction.
Intervention, RTI, Tier 2 & 3
Grades 2–3 - Early intervention in small to medium groups
Grades 4–6 - Beginning ELLs or cognitively delayed students
New! Blast Foundation Passages. Click here to learn more>>
Blast Teacher Guides
The Blast Teacher's Lesson Plans provide teachers with all the information they need to effectively present the Blast lessons. All the lessons are built for the teacher, and include a thorough explanation of the concepts, routines, and procedures. The lessons are easy to follow so they can be taught by a wide range of educators, not just seasoned literacy professionals and phonics specialists. For those unfamiliar with teaching phonemic awareness and phonics, the guides include incremental professional development for each lesson.
Blast Foundations Online
This essential interactive teacher presentation tool is used in conjunction with the Blast Foundations Teachers Guides to add a new dimension to instruction. Blast Foundations Online will help you engage emerging and struggling readers. This web based virtual manipulative will help make important phonics concepts obvious to their students. Students learn concepts faster and retain them better when the teacher uses this online teacher presentation tool.
New! Blast Foundation Passages are included in a 6 month or one year Blast Online subscription, and a complimentary download is available from Blast Online’s Supplemental Resources.Click here to learn more>>
Blast Student Workbooks
The Blast Students Workbooks are everything a student needs to participate in the lessons. Blast has two different workbook sets, the Primary Student Workbook (PRSW) and the Elementary Student Workbook (ELSW).
- The Primary Student Workbooks (PRSW)- Grade 1
- The Elementary Student Workbooks (ELSW) - Grade 2-3
The activities increase student outcomes, and also serve as light formative assessment, so teachers can understand who really mastered the concepts and who may need more instruction.
Blast Student Kit
The NEW Blast Student Kit now comes in a box and provides letter tiles and SyllaBoards to practice the phonics concepts taught in Blast Foundations.
The Blast Student Kit is designed for grades K-2 to work in conjunction with the Blast Foundations lessons, a phonics and phonemic awareness supplemental program for K-1.
Blast - Student Group Size, Scope and Sequence, and Lesson Structure
Blast Foundations lessons can be taught in various group sizes, depending on your situation. When used in kindergarten and early 1st grade, Blast can be taught as a whole class supplement, thus the group sizes are large. When it’s taught as an intervention in 1st and 2nd grade, it's typically taught in smaller groups because only those who are falling behind are provided with Blast.
The Blast Foundations scope and sequence is systematic and cumulative.
The scope and sequence covers explicit instruction in the foundational skills needed to help students who struggle with basic skills in reading in kindergarten through 2nd Grade. They will learn how to master words with cvc, digraphs, two-sound blends, trigraphs, and the vowel-consonant-e spelling. Students also learn how to apply functional strategies to successfully read multisyllabic words with ease. Blast targets the skills students need to build confidence with decoding skills in order to become accurate fluent readers.
Please click here for a full scope and sequence, included in the Blast Foundations Sample Lesson>>
Blast has 25 units which are comprised of 5 lessons per week. Designed to be completed in 15 to 20 minutes sessions, each lesson keeps students actively engaged in the learning process with multisensory teaching. In one week, students are immersed in 75-100 minutes of explicit instruction.
- Lesson 1 (Monday) – Letter Sounds / Sight Words
- Lesson 2 (Tuesday) – Phonemic Awareness
- Lesson 3 (Wednesday) – Phonics Instruction
- Lesson 4 (Thursday) – Student Practice
- Detective Work
- Word Sort
- Controlled/Partially Controlled Phrase Reading
- New! Blast Foundation Passages, to be taught after Lesson 4 is completed
- Lesson 5 (Friday) – Wrap-Up
- Partially Controlled Phrase and Sentence Reading
- Spell It! (Review and practice words with Phonics Concept from Lesson 3)
Diagnostics
The most effective first step toward implementing Blast Foundations is gathering data and establishing goals. If your data indicates that your students are still emerging with basic literacy skills (letter sound knowledge, sight words, and simple decodable text), then Blast might be right for them. You can use your existing data (e.g. DIBELS, AIMSWeb, PALs) to identify students. If you don’t have data on your students, we offer a family of free diagnostic tools that help qualify students for Blast. Download our free Foundational Skills Survey. The Foundational Skills Survey is a complimentary set of assessments that are commonly used in 1st grade. These complimentary packets contain everything you’ll need for initial assessment of an unlimited number of students. The packet also provides an explanation of how the survey results can be used to group students. Learn more and download our complimentary diagnostic assessments>>
Sight Words Survey
The Sight Words Survey is a complimentary set of assessments that determine how well a student reads high-frequency English words. It is designed to be used:
- in the beginning of Kindergarten through 3rd grade
- and with older students who still struggle to read high-frequency sight words
One-on-one assessment of:
- High-frequency sight word knowledge from the Pre-Primer through 3rd grade levels of the Dolch 220 list
- Automaticity reading sight words both in context (simple sentences) and in isolation
The data collected from these assessments can help determine the levels of sight words with which students are proficient and the levels with which they need more instruction and practice to gain automaticity.
Grouping Students
Successful reading interventions start with accurate diagnosis and grouping. Really Great Reading’s Grouping Matrix helps facilitate differentiated data-driven instruction and reporting. It is a free, web-based data management system that enables educators to group students (K- 12) according to the type and depth of their decoding difficulties. The same data management system can be used to monitor progress, report, and adjust.
NEW - Grouping Matrix Live Assess
Now you can assess and group your students in just one step. As you listen to your students read, enter the miscues directly into the Grouping Matrix, and it will do the rest. “Live Assess” will pinpoint the types of word a student is misreading, identify specific areas of confusion, total the types of errors, record the results, and group your students according to their decoding strengths and weaknesses. It’s never been easier to diagnose and group your students.
Learn more and sign up for free access to the Grouping Matrix>>
Professional Development
Teacher background knowledge is a key component to successful reading intervention. Really Great Reading offers different training options to provide teachers and interventionists with the background knowledge they’ll need to successfully diagnose, group, and teach struggling decoders. Even if you don’t use Blast Foundations, Phonics Blitz or Phonics Boost, our professional development will offer you valuable techniques for helping struggling readers.
See a schedule of workshops or learn more about our workshops, webinars and training modules>>
