At Reading Shift, we believe that reading proficiency is an essential but incomplete step towards language and literacy success.

Our goal is higher; to help your students find reading, spelling and writing enjoyable, engaging and enriching.

We focus on the Seven Layers of Literacy that develop
the three most essential—yet often overlooked—language abilities.

By the end of the first Reading Shift lesson, your students will be independently reading and spelling complex words in sentences.

Seven Layers of Literacy

Delayed, dyslexic and simply disinterested students often spend years learning to read, but then rarely pick up a book for enjoyment. For these students, writing, too, is often viewed as just another academic task, rather than a way to express one’s thoughts and emotions.

This situation is largely avoidable. Recent breakthroughs in research have led to methods that develop proficient readers, spellers and writers who find these activities to be enjoyable, enriching and engaging.

We at Sparking the Reading Shift have distilled these methods into a series of twelve lessons that develop The Seven Layers of Literacy. This approach approaches reading, spelling and sentence writing as a single intertwined ability. In each lesson, students progress from reading and spelling simple words to building longer words out of morphemes (in+struct +ion), the meaningful core of words in all languages.

They then create two-word natural pairs (ice cream, best friends), followed by three-word phrases (the kind student), the universal building blocks of sentences. Finally, students combine phrases into complex sentences. This level of success positively resets their relationship with literacy.

The Seven Layers of Literacy was inspired by leading researchers who take a multicomponent approach to reading development. These include Maryanne Wolf’s POSSuM word study, Nell Duke and Kelly Cartwright’s Bridging Processes, and Charles Perfetti’s Lexical Quality Hypothesis.

David Share’s theory, which I call The Combining Principle, states that students across the planet learn to read by initially combining a limited but learnable set of sounds and symbols into morphemes. These words branch out to have multiple meanings, which are combined into phrases and sentences.

These theories center on three critical—but often overlooked—components of literacy development: Morpheme, phrases and syntax. Together, they form the foundation for reading comprehension, written expression and literacy enjoyment.

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• Morphemes – In all the world's languages, written words are either units of meaning by themselves, like teach, water and power, or contains a core morpheme, called a base, like in+struct+ion, struct+ur+al and re+con+struct. Morphemes form the core of English spelling system, and, unlike phoneme-grapheme correspondences, are spelled consistently. Morphological development is also tightly tied to vocabulary growth.

• Phrases are groups of words that contain either a noun or a verb, but not both. They span the gap between words and sentences. Fluent readers don’t read or comprehend sentences word-by-word but group words into meaningful chunks of phrases. They also amplify the meaning of words – “the young student” has far more meaning than the individual words.

• Syntax defines how words, morphemes and phrases are arranged to form coherent and meaningful sentences. In all languages, syntax is essential for comprehension and sentence construction. Everything from children’s storybooks to science texts contain complex sentences that are of far greater complexity than conversational language. This is why sentence comprehension largely determines text-level compression.

Seven Layer of Literacy instruction has a noticeable effect on student engagement. Students who have long-struggled with decoding and spelling simple words soon find that they can read and spell poly-morphemic words in multi-phrase sentences. The result is a much-needed boost in confidence and interest in literacy instruction, which in turn provides much-needed motivation for both students and their teachers.

"Meaning making is the central goal of reading and writing - in the former the aim is to derive meaning, while in the latter it is to communicate meaning." Meghan Hicks, Australian Educator and Instructional Designer.

Seven Instructional Shifts

Below, I will use activities from Sparking the Reading Shift to demonstrate a Seven Layers of Literacy Lesson. Each layer is paired with an instructional shift that provides a different teaching framework, such as switching from syllable types to morphemes. While the sevens layer defines “what” is taught, the instructional shifts change “how” an activity is taught.

Together, the layers and the instructional shifts provide students with new insight into how written and spoken language works in a sensible, enriching system—not a series of isolated tasks. They often have an Ah! Ha! moment that motivates them to learn more.

The activities focus students’ attention with linguistically engaging word challenges. Students love challenges and are often eager to solve them. They also enjoy the great variety of activities, as well as how rapidly they can progress from one layer to the next.

The following activities provide all the training most educators and parents require to use Sparking the Reading Shift. Each page is a complete challenge, (partial activities shown below) containing instructions, response sheets, and all the words and sentences needed to complete a level. Each student needs a copy, as they are continually analyzing, spelling and writing in the books.

The books are inexpensive. More info and online ordering below.

Layer One
Single Word Reading & Spelling

Instructional Shift - students learn the relationships between the three word forms, graphemes (l – igh -t), morphemes (light) and phonemes /l/ /ai/ /t/. They see that a phoneme shift also changes a spelling and, more importantly, creates a new word, a morpheme.

Linguistic Challenge - figure out how phoneme and grapheme shifts create new, meaningful words - morphemes. .

Phoneme substitution word chains - The student is given a word, spit, and asked to change one phoneme, /t/ to /n/, to create a new word with a different pronunciation and meaning. This requires phoneme segmentation, manipulation and blending abilities.

There are two addition sound-spelling-meaning activities in Sparking the Reading Shift.

“Reading words and spelling words are two sides of a coin.” - Linnea Ehri

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Layer Two
Analyzing, Reading &
Spelling Morphemes

Instructional Shift -- While many methods delay multi-syllable word instruction, students immediately learn to identify morphemes in ploy-morphemic words. All longer words in English are composed of a base morpheme plus prefixes and suffixes, as needed.

Linguistic Challenge -- Identify base morphemes and affixes in words. This is an essential word solving ability that helps readers recognize thousands of unfamiliar words each year. Over two-thirds of unfamiliar words are identified by similarity with known morphemes.

In this challenge, students first circle the prefixes and suffixes, revealing the base word. They write the base, then spell each word as a "word sum" which solidifies its structure, spelling and meaning.
Finally, they show their understanding of the word by using it in a sentence.

Layer Three
Building Poly-Morphemic Words

Instructional Shift -- Next, students learn how all longer words are built—by combining a core morpheme, called a base, with prefixes and suffixes, as needed:

Linguistic Challenge -- figure out how to combine prefixes and suffixes with base morphemes to create poly-morphemic words.

Morphological Word Sums

Students first read the base word, play, then spell and write it, "p-l-ay plus s is rewritten as p-l-ay-s, plays." This is a very effect way of storing word in memory.

The lower activity, Morphological Matrix, creates a morphological word family. Students first read the affixes and the base, then they find words that they know. They draw lines to connect the morphemes. They then write the word sum, re+ act + ing , and then write the whole word as they spell it. If the student gets stuck, the teacher asks, "What is re plus act plus ive?"

There are five morphological activities in Sparking the Reading Shift.

There is an almost perfect correlation between the growth of morphological knowledge and vocabulary knowledge.

– Wagner et al. (2007)

Layer Four
Creating Word Pairs & Three Word Phrases

The Instructional Shift - These layers are often skipped, either to focus intensely on single words or in a rush to get to sentences.

The Linguistic Challenge - Figure out two word natural pairs like light blue, bright light, light sleeper, light year, or three word phrases to amplify the meaning of words.

If the student can't initially read the words, the teacher reads them. Then the student reads the words while searching for phrases. This reasoning, reading, spelling and rereading process solidifies the phrases in memory.

Layer Five
Analyzing & Writing Three Phrase Sentences

Instructional Shift -- Phrases as a bridge between words and sentences.

Linguistic Challenge -- figure out the correct order of phrases to make a meaningful sentence. This activity is often used to assess sentence comprehension.

Students read two sets of three phrases that are out of order, with help if needed, and then order the phrases into a meaningful sentence. Then they write the phrases.

There are four additional phrase activities in Sparking the Reading Shift.

The main barrier to text comprehension is understanding how complex sentences are structured.

Layer Six
Writing & Understanding Complex Sentences

The Instructional Shift - Syntactic activities help students understand that sentences are not just strings of words. Instead, students learn the meaningful relationships between groups of words in phrases and phrases in sentences.

The Linguistic Challenge - The Build a Better Sentence Challenge is a paraphrasing activity, where students figure out how to swap phrases to change the meaning of a sentence. This deeper understanding of sentences is strongly correlated with text comprehension.

The Sentence Matrix Challenge students get to pick the phrases that make up sentences. Combining phrases is not only a powerful way of developing writing abilities, but gives students a say in their writing.

The Seven Layers of Literacy approach eases students into writing so that they experience continuous success. As a result, resistance fades.

Layer Seven
Word, Phrase & Sentence Fluency

Each lesson in Sparking the Reading Shift end with either a Sentence Step Challenge, for word-to-sentence fluency practice, or a Read Slow and Smooth Challenge, which provides prosody practice.

Theses activities provide repeated reading practice. The prosody activity breaks sentences into phrases. The student slowly reads a line, pausing at each slash mark. They repeat the line until they read it smoothly, not like a robot. Speed is not the goal. Smooth, expressive reading is.

Phrase reading with prosody consistently raises reading comprehension by a grade-level or more. It is as effective and more efficient than repeatedly reading a whole chapter.

Enhanced Fluency and Comprehension Practice
Sparking the Fluency Shift

I was dissatisfied with the progress my students were making reading decodables and leveled books. I also wanted to bring the advantages of the Literacy Cycle to reading practice. So, I created Sparking the Fluency Shift, a collection of 36 one-page stories, each of increasing complexity and length.

The stories start at a basic first grade (~6 y/o) to a solid sixth grade level. I wanted to give my students the opportunity to read above grade level, as all their proficient peers do.

There are up to eight stories per grade level. Each story is slightly, but noticeably more difficult than the previous story, which provides much needed motivation. With such small steps between each story, readers often progress to a more difficult story every few weeks.

Each story is preceded by two pages of rehearsal practice, prereading fluency and comprehension boosting exercises that complement the stages in the Literacy Cycle. The more difficult spellings, poly-morphemic words and vocabulary, and complex phrases and sentences from each story are extracted and put into reading activities that are similar to those in Sparking the Fluency Shift.

In his new book, Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives, Timothy Shanahan shows that the greatest growth in comprehension and reading engagement comes from text that contain challenging words, sentences and vocabulary. Sparking the Fluency Shift provides exactly practice with these challenges. Shanahan promotes rehearsal practice, which he says raises comprehension scores by a grade level or more over a cold reading of the same material. Rehearsal practice is at the heart of each story in Sparking the Fluency Shift ($20). Each of the thirty-six, 150-to-400-word stories is preceded by two pages of rehearsal practice covering the challenging words and sentences.

The topics and the content for the stories were chosen by my very judgmental preteen and teenage students. The topics range from making friends and resolving conflicts, to fantasy stories about time travel.

For a free, three-story sample from Sparking the Fluency Shift complete with

rehearsal practice activities at the 1st, 3rd and 5th grade levels, click here

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Sparking the Reading Shift

As you have seen, Sparking the Reading Shift is committed to student success through the use of a great variety of challenging activities that reframe how students, and often their teachers, approach literacy learning.

The key to student success is treating reading, spelling and sentence writing as a seamless process. Expectations are kept high, but attainable. When I created the activities, I simple asked myself, "What type of words and sentence structures do I want my special education students to read, spell and write?" Then I made each level is only slightly more difficult. We went at a pace that suited each student. They often grew excited when they discovered the secrets behind spelling, word meaning and sentence composition and comprehension.

The activities are presented as word games, or challenges, Each page is a ready-to-use word and sentence activity, with brief instruction. A thirty-minute session once or twice a week is enough to quickly produce noticeable growth. This is a consumable workbook, as students are continually reading, spelling words and writing phrases and sentences in the book.

Sparking the Reading Shift is used for RTI, or as supplemental instruction. It is compatible with the full range of literacy approaches. There is no prep involved and is designed for new teachers and homeschooling parents to use without training.

Sparking the Reading Shift comes in two versions: Language-literacy Intervention ($28) contains16 one-hour lessons. This version is for students who have required extensive instruction from special education, classroom or reading teachers.

Sparking the Reading Shift: Language-literacy Enrichment ($18) contains 120 page,12 hour lessons in a consumable workbook format. This version contains the same word, morphological, phrase and sentence activities as in Language-literacy Intervention but in a briefer, accelerated format. For disfluent, disinterested & underperforming readers, including students reading at grade-level.

If you are unsure of which version to use, then start with Language-literacy Enrichment.

Both Sparking the Reading Shift and Sparking the Fluency Shift are available in PDF format for immediate download or in print, by mail (scroll right below).