The Intensive Phonological Awareness Program is a 12-week intervention program, with three 30 min. sessions planned per week for a total of 18 hours of intervention. The recommended group size is 6 students, but some interventionists may be successful including up to 8 students. It is possible to have fewer than 6 students, but at least 4 students in the group provide a varied learning environment.

The IPA Program is a soft-scripted, standardized treatment protocol. There are 36 lessons, and each lesson is presented as a lesson plan (activities, materials, teaching strategies) with suggested language (i.e., soft scripting) to present activities and scaffold children’s success. Additional ideas are provided in each lesson to facilitate students’ success. The program contains three units: (a) RHYME, (b) INITIAL SOUNDS, (c) FINAL SOUNDS, (d) SEGMENT WORDS and BLEND SOUNDS. Within each unit, the activities across the unit build in complexity. The culminating phonological awareness skill in each unit:

RHYME: e.g., Tell me a word that rhyme with DISH.

INITIAL SOUNDS: e.g., Tell me the first sound in the word DISH.

FINAL SOUNDS: e.g., Tell me the last sound in the word DISH.

SEGMENT and BLEND: e.g., Tell me the sounds in the word DISH. What words do these sounds make: D – I – SH?

In addition to phonological awareness, the IPA Program provides learning experiences so that students masters alphabet knowledge (letter names and letter sounds).

The IPA Program book is available Brookes Publishing or Amazon. The book includes several introductory chapters that provide background information and the 36 lesson plans (2 pages per lesson plan). The materials to implement the IPA Program are available as downloadable files that allow the book owner to print out all intervention materials.

If your school is interested in purchasing multiple copies at a discounted price, contact Brookes Publishing above or melanie.schuele@me.com. 

We planned the program and wrote the lesson plans with the idea that the interventionist would be a speech-language pathology, classroom teacher, special education teacher, or literacy specialist/coach. With guidance we think that a paraprofessional could implement the program. But we have 

The IPA Program is evidence-principled. We used the extant literature to inform the design of the treatment protocol, including scaffolding. Schuele and Boudreau (2008) provides a tutorial in the extant phonological awareness literature that supports the IPA Program.

Schuele, C. M. & Boudreau, D. (2008). Phonological awareness: Beyond the basics. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 39, 3-20. 

The IPA Program is evidence-based ~ We published one study that compared kindergarten children who participated in IPA Intervention and kindergarten children who did not participate in IPA intervention. 

Schuele, C. M., Justice, L., Knighton, K., Kingery, B., & Lee, M. (2008). Field-based evaluation of a two-tiered instruction for enhancing kindergarten phonological awareness. Early Education and Development, 19, 726-752.