In schools and in many after-school programs, motivation takes the form of extrinsic rewards, prizes, or even food.  Such extrinsic rewards have been proven to be ineffective (Deci & Ryan, 2016).  In all of my reading programs, I use only intrinsic motivation, that is internal motivation, motivation that comes from within.  The children read because they want to read, not because they are required to or want to obtain a prize or reward.  We wanted to kindle in each student a desire to read and enjoy reading.

I use hands-on projects to help generate intrinsic motivation (see ch. 8; Clanton Harpine, 2008).  It is not possible for a teacher, parent, or tutor to motivate a student, but you can create a motivating environment (see ch. 6 in Clanton Harpine, 2015).  The group-centered format is perfect for creating an intrinsically motivational environment.  At each session in my reading programs, the students travel from workstation to workstation to practice vowel clustering by reading, decoding, encoding, and working with the words being introduced that day.  Workstations with individualized rotation increase intrinsic motivation and individualize instruction.  Individualized instruction is essential for intrinsic motivation. 

Each day, a different vowel cluster is taught at the workstations with both my Camp Sharigan (Clanton Harpine, 2011) program and my Reading Orienteering Club (see ch. 4, Clanton Harpine, 2013) after-school program.  To increase intrinsic motivation, the students use the words they are learning to work with and place these words on puppets, rockets, and a variety of other hands-on projects.  Completing a project helps struggling students learn organizational skills and learn to read and follow directions.  The students work hard to complete their projects.  The hands-on puppet projects are used for a puppet play at the end of the week at both Camp Sharigan and the Reading Orienteering Club. 

These hands-on projects become teaching tools and are also motivational tools to encourage students to want to learn.  They are not simply arts and crafts projects; they are a teaching technique placed within a supportive group-centered prevention program that focuses on both teaching and counseling.  I want to undo the harms of reading failure.   I want to encourage children to try again and believe that they can learn to read.  Intrinsic motivation works hand-in-hand with vowel clustering because students must have skills if they are going to believe that they can read and then build an internal desire to read.  A progressive step system of learning is essential in rebuilding an intrinsic desire to learn.
 
Click on images to go to Springer website where chapter downloads are available. The books are also listed on Amazon.

All of my reading programs use progressive steps, Step 1, Step 2, Step 3.  Having everyone progress through a series of steps keeps children from being labeled or stigmatized as slow readers.  At both Camp Sharigan and the Reading Orienteering Club after-school program, all students start at Step 1, regardless of age or ability.  They proceed upward through the steps until they reach their ability level or capture five words. (My research found that working with five words at a time was best).  Stopping after five words are captured, this insures that children are not given work that is too hard for them. 
 
Capture is another word for missed.  Instead of saying the child missed the word or the word is wrong, I say that the word is tricky, so, let’s capture it and learn the word.  I want children to be challenged but not overwhelmed.  Children capture 5 words that they cannot read or spell.  They capture and learn each word using the 4 steps (discussed in my 2-14-18 blog post). 
 
Sometimes a student, even a third grader, may only be able to read or complete the work at the Step 1 level.  That’s okay.  Regardless of a child’s age, each child works through the steps, advancing one step at a time to the best of their ability.  All children are encouraged and supported in their accomplishments.  The steps and workstations are not labeled or identified by age or grade.  First and third graders work side by side at the same workstation, at the same time.  As children see improvement, their self-efficacy, their belief that they can learn to read, improves as well.  Children who see themselves improving begin to believe in themselves and to believe that, yes, they truly can learn to read. 
 
The step system of progression is stressed by having students begin reading vowel clustered stories (a story that uses only one vowel sound at a time) on the first day.  For example, I wrote The Story of At.  Every word in the story is built on the at sound:  The cat sat at a black hat.  The sentences in the story are very simple, so each child who knows the consonant sounds can decode the words and read the story. 

To reduce the frustration that failure causes students to feel, I use a 4-step teaching method to help children learn to read words.  When students encounter a word that they do not know or cannot read, the word is called a tricky word.  They capture the word, and then use the 4 steps to learn the word.  I use the word capture instead of saying that a student missed a word.  This helps students overcome the feeling that they have failed.  Yes, they know that they missed the word, but they like blaming the word for being tricky, and to be perfectly honest, words and letter sounds are tricky. 

The 4 steps are to (1) break the word down letter-by-letter, sound-by-sound, learning to pronounce the word correctly; (2) practice spelling the word out loud and then write the word correctly on paper; (3) give a definition for the word by looking the word up correctly in the dictionary, and (4) write a sentence using the word, making sure the word is used correctly and that the sentence is grammatical.  Children too young to write a sentence can give the sentences orally.  All children write the words correctly on manuscript writing paper, making sure that they are shaping their letter correctly.  Writing is one of the stages in learning to read.

By using the 4 steps, students can learn the word’s meaning and usage instead of just learning the phonemic sounds or pronouncing a word.  Learning how to spell a word and learning the meaning of a word is very important.  To read effectively and fluently, students need to learn how to read or pronounce words, to spell, to define, and to use words correctly in a sentence or story.  Teaching techniques such as the 4-steps help students to achieve these goals. The 4 steps fit perfectly into my overall teaching plan with vowel clustering in a group-centered format.