Three explicit, systematic lessons from second grade to high school, each with an original informational passage, five text-dependent questions, and the materials and game that make it run.
Students in intervention need explicit, sequential instruction at every age: a second grader sorting open and closed syllables, a fifth grader splitting two-syllable words, a high schooler taking apart Latin roots. Older students need it without materials that feel like they were made for second grade. Their teachers need lessons that run minute by minute, so the routine holds when the period gets hard.
Word work alone isn't enough, either. If students only ever decode word lists, they never see the pattern pay off in a real text.
The Simple View of Reading says comprehension needs both word recognition and language comprehension, so a lesson that drills only one leaves the job half done. The word work builds the word recognition strands of Scarborough's Reading Rope; the passage and its questions put the same pattern to work for vocabulary, background knowledge, and inference.
A fixed question order lowers the load of figuring out the task, so students spend their effort on the text. It also gives the teacher a quick read on which skill is breaking down.
The game's final room and the geography alphabet use long words from science, math, and social studies, the words these students meet in their other classes.
Every plan names a mastery target and what happens below it. In Lesson 1, coding accuracy under 80% on the exit check means the next day opens with a reteach of open versus closed syllables using four word pairs, not new learning. Timed reads are compared with each student's own baseline, not a class norm.
Each game room reviews every syllable type taught before it, so practice stays cumulative instead of one type at a time.
The routines students practice here are the same ones teachers learn in Decoding the Code, so the two projects work as a pair.
The full set lives on my teaching portfolio: the lesson plans, the three passages with their questions, the materials pack, and the playable game.
