Acellus Reading takes a whole new approach to teaching students how to
read. It follows the adventures of animated characters, Tobler and Beek, as they discover the basics
of reading. Their teacher is a cute little pig named Sweetie Lips.
The first goal of the program is to develop a "phonemic awareness" in the student, or the
ability to identify individual sounds and their order within words. Each sound is presented in a
discovery format, so that a student can figure out a sound rather than having to remember it. The letter
symbols are also introduced at the same time.
As students begin to discover sounds, they are introduced to real words that are found in books. They
then have the opportunity to read the books and choose the appropriate picture for each sentence, thus
developing "concept imagery", or the ability to form mental images for the concepts and ideas
expressed by language.
Several words in the English language are extremely hard for a student to decode, especially words with a
"schwa" vowel sound, commonly found in words with more than one syllable. To help students be able
to read the more complicated words, some basic expectancies are presented, including how to break words into
syllables, common endings and how to decide which sound to use for the letter C.
There are several words that are often called sight words because they are used so often that decoding them
each time will really slow down a student's ability to read, especially since several of these "sight
words" don't decode the way they should. Students work on each "sight word" through a series
of three levels, first reading it and then spelling it before it is finally passed off.
Thus, Acellus Reading incorporates phonemic awareness, concept imagery, basic
expectancies and sight words. And with such fun characters as Tobler, Sweetie Lips and Beek reading becomes
an entertaining experience as well.
Acellus Reading comes pre-loaded on its own unique server. Teachers using
Acellus Reading have access to the advanced record keeping and reporting
features of Acellus. Daily course updates are provided so that the latest course
enhancements are available to schools as quickly as possible.
