Pelham, N.Y. (April 20, 2006) – Researchers have well documented that when students get off to a poor start in reading, they rarely catch up. That’s why many schools are turning to the strategy of reading intervention to help address each student’s particular weaknesses. To facilitate this process, Benchmark Education Company, a leading provider of literacy products and services for K-8 students and their teachers, has developed a new targeted intervention resource: Phonics Skill Bags for Intervention.

The Phonics Skill Bags program provides struggling readers and their teachers with support materials based on the particular phonics skill needing improvement. Teachers use a pre-assessment to diagnose a student’s skill deficiency, and then can assign an all-inclusive Skill Bag with that specific focus.

Phonics Skill Bag sets are available at three levels (beginning, extending and advanced phonics) for grades K-6. In all, the complete Phonics program includes 153 individual Skill Bags addressing every letter and phoneme, plus additional irregular phonics skills and multisyllabic word-solving strategies. In addition, the bags include explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, sight word vocabulary, and spelling.

"We originally envisioned our Skill Bags as ideal for intervention during summer school, particularly for those teachers who don’t have specific training in literacy intervention. We felt the Skill Bags would work in summer school partially because of their easy implementation," said Tom Reycraft, president of Benchmark Education.

"But many educators asked us to help them apply these Skill Bags to daily intervention settings for their at-risk students. By making the skill lessons flexible in duration, we were able to create targeted intervention materials for teachers to use during the regular school day or extended-day learning."

Phonics Skill Bags are available as three complete program sets starting at $795. Because teachers can share the Skill Bags using a checkout system, only one set is needed per site. Each individual Phonics Skill Bag provides all-inclusive, nonconsummable materials for six students, which may include phonics readers, letter and word cards, reproducible tools, audio CDs, poster, teacher’s guides, and a "Quick Phonics Assessment" for student placement.

Phonics Skill Bags qualify for many funding sources, including Title I and Reading First. For more information, including detailed pricing packages, visit www.benchmarkeducation.com or phone 1-877-236-2465.