Teach phonemic awareness, phonics, and other foundational reading skills to beginning readers with Read Naturally GATE+'s explicit reading instruction. This motivating program provides scripted, interactive phonemic awareness and phonics exercises based on scientific research. Students master high-frequency words and decoding skills as they improve their fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary.

GATE+ provides a systematic, direct-instruction phonics program for beginning readers, instruction in all five components of reading in every lesson, carefully scripted phonics lessons that can easily be taught by a teacher or teacher assistant to small groups or a whole class, digital downloads including student workbooks, progress graphs, PowerPoint lessons to display on a screen or Smartboard, assessments, and more.

Students respond as they interact with letters, key words, and stories in the teacher's flipbook and in their workbooks. As the group works through the steps, the students master letter sounds, decodable words, high-frequency words, decodable sentences, and a nonfiction story. Students track progress on their graphs.?

Read Naturally GATE+ Steps
1. Learn About and Listen for Vowel Sounds in Words
The teacher provides the sound of a featured letter or letter combination, and the students decide if various words contain that sound. This listening activity promotes phonemic awareness, in particular the ability to recognize the featured sounds in each word.
2. Blend Sounds Into Words
The teacher blends letter sounds together slowly, and the students determine what word the teacher has made. This listening activity improves phonemic awareness, in particular the ability to recognize words made by sounds or word parts blended together.
3. Segment Words Into Sounds
Using sound boxes, students make a dot in a box for each sound they hear the teacher say. This phonemic awareness activity develops students' ability to recognize the sounds made by the letters in words.
4. Practice Letter Sounds With and Without Teacher Support
Students practice the letter sounds with and then without teacher support. These activities promote the mastery of the sounds of the featured letters.
5. Decode Sound-Out Words With Teacher Support
The teacher and the students slowly blend the letter sounds into words. This teaches the decoding of phonetically regular words (sound-out words) containing the featured sounds. Many of these words are also high-frequency words.
6. Read the Spell-Out Word(s) With Teacher Support
The teacher gives a lesson on one or more phonetically irregular, high-frequency words (spell-out words) and guides the students through the process of reading the word, spelling the word, and reading the word again until the students can do these steps independently. Students learn to read and spell dozens of useful words as well as a strategy for learning phonetically irregular, high-frequency words in the future.
7. Read the Lesson Words Without Teacher Support
The students read each lesson word as the teacher points to the word. This promotes mastery of decoding sound-out words containing featured sounds and mastery of reading the spell-out words taught in the lesson.
8. Read Words Down, Read Words Across, and Read Words Down and Across
With teacher guidance, students practice reading down the columns of words in a word list and then reading across the rows of words. This step highlights the patterns in words, teaches common word families and high-frequency words, and teaches the decoding of words with the featured phonics patterns.
9. Read Decodable Sentences
Students read decodable sentences made up of the words and sounds they learned in the current and previous lessons. This step provides practice reading connected text with the featured phonics pattern(s).
10. Spelling
Students write spell-out words and sound-out words from the story. This step develops phonemic awareness, gives students practice writing short words with the featured phonics patterns as well as irregular high-frequency words, and improves spelling skills.
11. Make a Prediction
The group writes a prediction sentence together. This pre-reading activity prepares the students’ minds for reading a nonfiction story that emphasizes the featured phonics pattern(s).
12. Cold Timing for One Minute and Mark the Cold-Timing Score on the Graph
The teacher times the class for one minute as each student reads the story independently and determines their words correct per minute. Each student graphs their cold-timing score in blue. This step establishes a baseline for progress monitoring, the component of the Read Naturally Strategy that motivates the student to improve.
13. Read Along With the Teacher
The students read along quietly with the teacher, stopping to decode unfamiliar words containing the featured sound(s). This step is the teacher-modeling component of the Read Naturally Strategy, which helps the students learn new words and master others as well as learn proper pronunciation, expression, and phrasing.
14. Practice and Pass the Story and Mark the Final Score on the Graph
The teacher times the students for one minute multiple times while each student reads the story independently. During the pass-timing portion, the teacher typically listens to each student read individually. This step is the repeated-reading component of the Read Naturally Strategy, which helps students improve fluency, master difficult words, and understand the story. Each student graphs their pass-timing score in red above the cold-timing score (in blue) to show how much the student's fluency has improved.
15. Answer the Questions
Students answer questions about the story. Responding to the text holds the student accountable for meaning, develops the ability to answer many types of questions, and provides teachers with information about how well the student comprehends the story.
16. Write a Sentence About the Story (optional)
Students write about something they remember from the story, which improves comprehension.

GATE+ is available in three different levels; 0.8, 1.3, and 1.8. Each level includes a Teacher's Flipbook, Teacher's Manual, and digital downloads for $175 per level.