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DANCING DEFINITIONS™ is a pre-reading teaching strategy that leads to mastery of definitions critical to understanding a text selection that is to be read or a subject that is to be studied. Using inquiry approaches, the teacher engages students in discussions and demonstrations of the vocabulary. To ensure understanding, students are guided in relating the vocabulary to their experiences and prior knowledge. After students clearly understand all the words and concepts, the teacher leads them in the memorization of the definitions and example sentences. As a result students internalize a reservoir of relevant academic language to use as they think about, discuss, and incorporate the new vocabulary. Both brain-based and culture-based approaches are incorporated in this process.

ESSENTIAL SUMMARIES contains a culture-centered strategy designed to support successful comprehension of content-area texts. It does this by building, in an accelerated manner, essential vocabulary, concept, and background knowledge prior to reading. Many important summaries can be taught using this strategy. It is efficient in the amount of time it takes to implement and is powerful in its impact. Teachers can identify a school year-based summary for each major concept and bank of information to be taught. By using the entire Essential Summaries strategy, underachieving students gain the advantage of added support for the development of excellent comprehension skills.

PHONIC PATTERN HOPSCOTCH™ is an Intensified Accelerated (IASYS) strategy for students at all levels (primary grades through adult) who need to acquire the necessary decoding skills to fluently read a large number of words from multi-grade materials in a short period of time. Teachers use the Highly Recurring Phonic Elements, as a basis for quick mastery of a significant number of essential sound symbol relationships. Phonic Pattern Hopscotch is then used to demonstrate how to approach words students need to decode using their knowledge of the Highly Recurring Phonic Elements. This strategy has been instrumental in helping teachers break the stagnation of achievement in decoding skills for many students, including those in special education programs, who have not responded well to their school’s adopted phonics program. Mastery of Phonic Pattern Word Lists using the Highly Recurring Phonic Elements is another component of the IASYS phonics program.

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