What Is Horizons?
Horizons is a research-based, field-tested, reading intervention to teach students with cognitive disabilities how to read.
The three phases of Horizons are as follows:
- Pre-Reading Phase
- Students learn to identify letters.
- Students engage in a variety of phonemic-awareness tasks.
- Students learn the sounds for the letters in the words they will read.
- Students learn the basic left-to-right sequencing conventions for letters in words and words in sentences.
- Students learn to follow directions related to icons and pictures in their books.
- Students practice simpler versions of the comprehension activities that they will later apply to stories they read.
- Highly Prompted Reading Phase
- In this phase, students begin reading words phrases, or sentences that are parts of stories the teacher presents orally.
- Later in this phase, students are reading stories that are approximately 90 words long.
- Throughout this phase, most words are printed in a way that prompts children with information about which sounds are irregular, which letters go together to form combinations, and which letters are silent.
- Less-Prompted Reading Phase
- In this phase, students read texts that have few or no word-attack strategies.
- Students reread some selections they have read earlier, as well as new selections.