When it comes to reading intervention lesson plans, having a structured program can make planning lessons straightforward. However, not all teachers have access to pre-made curricula or intervention materials. Whether you’re a classroom teacher juggling multiple responsibilities or a specialist working in a resource-limited setting, you might find yourself needing to create lessons from scratch. (This was me back in 2014. I know how time-consuming it can be!)
The good news is that with a clear structure and a focus on essential reading components, you can deliver effective interventions tailored to your students’ needs. This blog post will guide you through building a reading intervention lesson plan that supports struggling readers—even if you don’t have a prepackaged program at your disposal.
You can trust the strategies and tips shared in this blog because they’re grounded in evidence-based practices. I’m trained in the Orton-Gillingham approach and hold two certifications recognized by the International Dyslexia Association. With 18 years of experience teaching special education, I’ve helped countless students overcome reading challenges, and I’m here to share what works!
This blog post will focus on providing suggestions for phonics and phonemic awareness instruction, specifically targeting foundational skills typically taught at the K-2 level. However, these ideas can also be adapted for older students who need support in these areas. While fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension are equally important for reading development, they fall outside the scope of these particular tips. (But keep in mind that many weaknesses in fluency and comprehension are caused by inaccurate reading. This means that when we improve phonemic awareness and phonics skills, we should see a boost in overall fluency and comprehension!)
By the end, you’ll have a practical framework for crafting your reading intervention lesson plans, selecting activities, and organizing your time, so you can help your students build the skills they need to become confident, capable readers.
What are the key components of an effective reading intervention lesson plan?
Students with foundational weaknesses in phonics and phonemic awareness need explicit, systematic instruction that focuses on:
- Phonemic Awareness: Help students identify, segment, blend, and manipulate individual sounds in words to improve their reading and spelling ability.
- Phonics: Teach the relationship between sounds and their corresponding letters or letter patterns to build decoding skills for unfamiliar words.
- Word Recognition: Help students develop automaticity with high-frequency words, which means they will recognize more words “by sight.” (This means they have orthographically mapped the words to long-term memory for immediate retrieval.)
- Spelling: Sometimes we become so focused on reading instruction that we forget that spelling needs to be explicitly taught, too! By reinforcing phonics patterns through encoding (spelling) practice, students will strengthen their overall reading and writing skills.
Effective intervention lessons should also include plenty of opportunities for guided practice, immediate feedback, and application of skills to connected text to reinforce learning.
Are you feeling lost about where to begin with your reading intervention lesson plans?
The process is set in motion with baseline assessments. For younger students, a word reading assessment with real words will identify any gaps in their knowledge. For older students (third grade and above), consider a nonsense word reading assessment. Assessing with nonsense words provides a clearer picture of a student’s true decoding abilities because nonsense words can’t be memorized or guessed.
Are you really short on time and can’t imagine how or when you’d complete baseline assessments on all of your students? Use a spelling assessment instead! Reading and spelling rely on the same understanding of letter/sound relationships, so a student’s spelling errors will reveal any gaps in their foundational phonics skills. Using a word list from a reading assessment (like the ones mentioned above), simply ask your students to spell the words instead of reading them. This means you can assess all of your students at the same time, allowing you to get started teaching sooner!
Tip: If you’re working with students who can read words with a variety of phonics skills but really struggle to spell simple words with accuracy, the Reading Intervention Lesson Plan Guide has guidance for customizing your lesson plans to meet these students’ needs!
Analyze your data and make your groups.
Once you have your baseline data, sort students into groups based on what they need to learn. Please, if a student is accurate with a skill but not yet fluent, don’t skip over the phase of developing fluency! Let’s say a child can read all kinds of syllable types (closed syllables, silent e, vowel teams, r-controlled vowels) but they are laboriously decoding every word. Start at the lowest skill level where they are not yet fluent and make sure these students have practice, practice, practice to develop fluency! Students must become fluent at lower levels if we want them to become accurate and fluent at higher levels.
Time to plan!
Look at how far you’ve come! You’ve completed baseline assessments, looked over your data, and formed groups. Now’s the fun part– how will you teach your groups?
First, look at your schedule and determine how often you can see your students. Three to five days per week for at least thirty minutes per session is ideal. Some students will need more time and others will do well with less. Use your knowledge of your students and your professional judgment to set up a schedule as best you can. It doesn’t have to be perfect before you get started!
Using a Scope and Sequence to Guide Growth
It may be easy to get started but you also need to know what you’ll do after your students demonstrate mastery of the skills you’re about to teach them. Once your students in the silent e group are reading and spelling decodable text with silent e fluently, what will you teach next?
You may be able to follow the scope and sequence of your school’s tier 1 phonics program but at an earlier starting point. For example, if your school uses Fundations, the typically performing third graders are working on Level 3 skills while your intervention students may be working on Level 1 or Level 2 skills. Customize their instruction with your lesson plans because the tier 1 program may not have clicked with these students the first time around.
Don’t have a scope and sequence to refer to? I offer a suggested scope and sequence in the Reading Intervention Lesson Plan Guide.
Learn about the essential components of a reading intervention lesson plan.
I’m offering a brief overview of the activities to include in your reading intervention lesson plans. If you want more specific directions for implementing these activities, be sure to check out the Reading Intervention Lesson Plan Guide.
1. Visual and Auditory Drills
The visual drill is when you hold up a letter card and your students orally state the sound(s) that the letter(s) represent. We call it the visual drill because your students are looking at the letter cards.
The auditory drill is when the teacher says a sound and the students write the letter(s) that represent it on their whiteboard. We call it the auditory drill because your students are listening to the sound to produce the corresponding letter(s).
2. Review Words
This is a time to quickly practice reading and spelling words with previously learned skills. Review work is essential to building a strong foundation in early reading and spelling skills. In your silent e group, this might mean practicing CVC words. Your vowel team group might read and spell words with consonant blends during their review work.
Want a quick and easy way to practice review words? Use word chains! We can use word chains for both reading and spelling. Word chains are when you (or your students) change one letter at a time to create a new word. Once your students know how to complete word chains, you can zip right through this review section of your lesson and get into the new skills.
The Reading Intervention Lesson Plan Guide delves more deeply into how and why to complete word chains for reading and spelling review. You can make up your own or save planning time with ready-made word chains. If you have access to computers or a projector, make it more fun by using Paws and Spell on your whiteboard!
3. Teach New Concepts
Now it’s time for the meat of your lesson! Introduce the new concept that you want your students to learn over the next few days. This portion of the reading intervention lesson will vary depending on which skill you’re teaching, but you want to teach your students how to read and spell words with the new concept. Consider browsing my syllable types blog series to learn more about introducing specific phonics concepts.
4. Practice New Concepts
To develop accuracy and then automaticity, students need to practice reading and spelling words with the new skill. This can be as simple as writing words on the board for your students to read and then asking them to spell some words on their whiteboard. You can also use letter cards, letter tiles, paper and pencil, or student readers or worksheets that are made for this purpose.
You also want to make time for your students to read and write sentences with the new skill. When I did not have access to a program, I typed sentences and printed a set for each student to read. Then I had them saved in a file for the next group of students who were working on the same skill.
A comprehensive phonics word list will give you handy access to hundreds of decodable words sorted by phonics skill to use for reading and spelling practice. When you need sentences for reading and spelling practice, look at your word list, look at the high frequency words your students have learned and are currently working on, and use them to come up with some sentences.
No time to draft your own sentences? Grab some worksheets, activities, and games with decodable sentences aligned to dozens of different phonics skills!
5. High Frequency Word Learning
Include time to review previously-taught high frequency words, as well as time for learning and practicing new high frequency words. Read this blog to brush up on effective, research-based strategies for teaching the high frequency words. Consider playing some quick, no-prep games with the words.
6. Read Connected Text
Once students get a handle on the new skill at the word and sentence levels, they must practice at the passage level. When working with foundational reading skills, we can accomplish this with decodable passages, which are often referred to as “training wheels” for early readers.
There are several ways to interact with decodable texts that extend beyond simply listening to your students read the passage and helping them when they get stuck. If you want to learn how to turn a decodable passage into a complete lesson, check out the Reading Intervention Lesson Plan Guide. Our line of decodable stories also includes complete lesson plans and comprehension questions for each story.
Wondering where the phonemic awareness section of the lesson is? It’s in the word chains! Spelling word chains is an activity that incorporates phonics and phonemic awareness into one high-impact, low-prep activity.
Remember: Outside the scope of these lessons, be sure students are working on vocabulary development and comprehension through shared reading. You may also wish to devote some additional time to fluency practice.
Consider investing in premade word lists and decodable sentences and passages.
Make sure you’re set up for success when implementing small groups focused on phonics skills. Having the right resources—words, sentences, and text for students to read and spell—makes all the difference.
If you already have some materials from your school’s Tier 1 program, that’s a great start! Remember, you can always borrow resources from a lower grade level if needed. For example, if you’re working with third graders who need to strengthen their skills with CVC words, check with your kindergarten or first-grade colleagues. Their tier 1 manuals often have word lists and decodable texts that can fit perfectly into your intervention lessons.
But here’s where I can make your life easier: I’ve created materials specifically for this purpose, saving you time and effort. If you’d rather not dig through books or track down resources, these ready-made options might be just what you need. Think of it as a way to lighten your load while still giving your students exactly what they need to succeed!
Looking to build your own library of go-to resources that you can use year after year? I’ve got some great options for you:
- Comprehensive Phonics Word Lists for K-2 Level Skills
- Decodable Words and Sentences
- Decodable Stories
How do I keep track of my reading intervention lesson plans?
I’m a big fan of creating systems that keep me organized and putting those systems in a binder. (And if you follow me on Instagram, you know I’m a bit of a binder hoarder!)
When I was in the classroom, I’d often spend Thursday and Friday prepping my binder for the week ahead and filling it with everything I would need. Each group of students had their own section, which included their lesson plans, my data collection sheets, and any worksheets the students were going to use over the course of the week. Each section had a few sheet protectors in it because it’s so easy to slip a set of worksheets into one. If students were not done with a page at the end of the lesson, I’d collect the pages and slip them back into a sheet protector for our next session.
Before I had a program to rely on, my lesson plans started as handwritten notes. Over time, I became more skilled at structuring my lessons and following a schedule that allowed sufficient practice time with the activities I wanted to include each week. I created my own reading intervention lesson plan templates that I could print and customize for each new week. Now those lesson plan templates, along with greater details about planning your lessons, are available to you!
What about progress monitoring?
If your students are on an IEP or an intervention plan with previously determined goals, those plans will determine what data you are collecting and how often.
If you are free to decide, then plan ahead of time! Choose what data to collect and how often you will collect it. Knowing what you intend to teach over the next few days and weeks, how will you know that your students have learned what you taught? Do you expect to see improvement in their word reading? Are you hoping their spelling test scores will improve? Would you like them to read decodable sentences with greater accuracy?
Word-level decoding (reading) tests or dictation (spelling) tests are two common options for progress monitoring. You may be able to use the same assessment you used for baseline testing. You can also use a comprehensive phonics word list to select words for your students to read and spell at the end of each week or unit.
If you plan to complete your progress monitoring with a dictation test, use this free premade dictation sheet to assess letter/sound knowledge, word level spelling, high frequency word spelling, and writing of decodable sentences.
You may not collect data every week, particularly if you only see your students three times per week. Note on your lesson plan which day you plan to collect data.
Wrapping Up: Building Success One Lesson at a Time
Designing effective reading intervention lessons without a pre-made program might seem overwhelming at first, but with a clear structure and a focus on foundational skills, it’s absolutely doable. By prioritizing phonics and phonemic awareness, using engaging, targeted activities, and consistently monitoring progress, you can make a significant impact on your students’ reading abilities!
If you’re looking for even more guidance, my Reading Intervention Lesson Plan Guide provides more detailed information, recommended resources to purchase, a suggested scope and sequence, and customizable lesson plan templates to help you organize and structure your groups with ease. It’s the perfect tool to save time and ensure your intervention lessons are as effective as possible.
Start small, stay consistent, and watch as your students grow in skills and confidence—and if you need extra support, my guide is here to help you every step of the way!
