Rigby To Launch Rigby Focus Forward, An Intensive Reading Intervention Program for Grades 3-8

Boston, TX - Rigby, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Supplemental Publishers, one of the leading educational publishers, recently announced plans to launch Rigby Focus Forward, a groundbreaking intensive reading intervention program for grades 3–8.

Scheduled for release in July 2008, Rigby Focus Forward addresses two major challenges facing upper elementary and middle-school students: how to acquire the critical reading and writing skills that they have struggled to grasp, and how to gain the confidence and motivation they need to be successful.

To meet these challenges, Rigby Focus Forward provides critical foundational reading and writing skills, high-interest student books with built-in scaffolding, connected comprehension instruction across whole groups and small groups, and predictable routines that make classroom management easy. Designed with English language learners (ELL) in mind, Rigby Focus Forward includes differentiated ELL strategies at point of use in daily lesson plans.

"We are very pleased to provide teachers with this powerful intervention program," said Erin Kinard, editorial director, Reading/ESL, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Supplemental Publishers. "Rigby Focus Forward will help striving readers experience daily achievement while building the long-term confidence they need to become successful readers and writers."

With Rigby Focus Forward, students not only read a book every day, but they engage in the writing process every day. The program's Writing Build-ITs provide hands-on support for students as they put together the pieces of the writing puzzle to build basic sentences, paragraphs and reports. Technology support for Rigby Focus Forward includes Rigby READS Intervention Online for accurate placement, targeted diagnostic data and ongoing progress-monitoring, and Rigby Intervention Fluent Reader software to help students improve their fluency using repeated reading strategies. Rigby Focus Forward provides an initial in-service training and program DVD.

SOURCE: Rigby