The RAVE-O Program

A Comprehensive, Fluency-Based Reading Intervention Program.

RAVE-O combines our best knowledge about phonological processes, decoding principles, and vocabulary development with new knowledge about lexical retrieval and automaticity for the subprocesses of reading.

The RAVE-O program is based on a large, three-city (Boston, Atlanta, and Toronto), five year, National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) intervention project, conducted by Maryanne Wolf and her colleagues, Robin Morris and Maureen Lovett, to investigate the efficacy of state-of-the-art reading intervention packages with discrete subtypes of reading-disabled children. RAVE-O was developed and evaluated at Tufts University’s Center for Reading and Language Research. Students who have completed the curriculum have shown significant gains in both specific and global reading skills.

The RAVE-O program works systematically and simultaneously not only at the word level, but also on multiple linguistic components at the connected text level. A major goal, therefore, is quite literally to teach our struggling readers explicitly in multiple ways, and over many different exposures, what we want their brains to do on their own. The instruction is sequenced so the child is immediately connecting the various types of linguistic information about a word in the same instructional hour. The curriculum is designed to assist primarily struggling second and third graders. The program has been used very successfully with children as old as the fourth grade and it is always presented in conjunction with the phonology program of choice.

We do something disarmingly simple. We teach a small corpus of very carefully selected CORE WORDS every week that embody what we want the child’s brain to do with all read words. Each of the four to five core words learned every week serves as a pivot for learning multiple aspects of linguistic knowledge. This is the foundation for the RAVE-O premise---the more the child knows about a word, the faster and better the word is read and understood. Thus, the program attempts to address in explicit instructional activities both the major components in reading and also the major known impediments to reading development at the letter, word, and connected text levels.

Further, every effort is made to make each activity memorable, creative, and often whimsical, so that we foster mutually engaged teachers and learners. We wish to elicit and harness what they know about oral language to help teach them what they don’t know yet about written language. In the process we wish the children to view themselves anew as successful learners, poised to learn to read. To read more about the RAVE-O program and other research from the Center for Reading and Language Research, please click here.

Note: The kit includes:

Manual
Reproducible Binder
Spelling Pattern Cards
3 copies each of each weeks Minute Stories
Word Wall Words and more.