The 6 Secret Codes is the core component of Reading Buddy 2.0. It provides students with a thorough grounding in reading, enabling them to master a very limited set of universal rules that govern how English words are read.
With almost no memorization, students will learn to read and to spell more than 1200 of the most common English words.
This remarkable reading feat exceeds the vocabulary of most second graders.
When a student's reading readiness has been verified (for example, with the Reading Readiness Assessment tools built into Reading Buddy 2.0), most home school students will be able to learn to reliably read within a matter of months.
With very, very few exceptions, English consonants are read and pronounced in just one way. Because of this, programs that focus on phonics are excellent for teaching students about consonants. Vowels, in contrast, can be long or short, and teaching exactly when a vowel is short and when it is long is one of a teacher's greatest challenges. It is also one of the most difficult concepts for young students to master as they learn to read.
The extensive research behind Reading Buddy 2.0 makes clear that this confusing situation for students can be remedied when it is recognized that only six basic rules govern how vowels are treated.
The 6 Secret Codes component in Reading Buddy 2.0 focuses on those rules. This component provides interactive lessons with a small set of words, practices that enable students to see how each rule applies to a large number of words, stories that the students read to their teacher to demonstrate their knowledge of each code with new words, and interactive games that reinforce each of the concepts with a large group of words.
A supplemental component, Word Family Fun, provides, in a game-like setting, extensive practice on the relationships within word families, enabling students to build a cognitive structure that will enable them to generalize their new knowledge to the accurate reading of entirely new words.
Reading Buddy 2.0 is accompanied by an extensive teacher's manual that provides step-by-step guidance to optimize your use of the software. It also summarizes the extensive scientific literature that forms the conceptual rationale for Reading Buddy 2.0.
You can download a free copy of the Reading Buddy 2.0 Teacher's Manual by clicking here. Using this manual requires you to have a copy of the Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your PC. You can obtain a free copy of that program at www.adobe.com.