To meet the needs of the K-1 students who have been identified at risk for dyslexia, the staff of the Luke Waites Center for Dyslexia and Learning Disorders at Scottish Rite for Children has developed a 100-lesson reading intervention called Build: A K-1 Early Reading Intervention.

Build is a small group intervention that addresses five specific components of reading intervention. Each component is taught developmentally using a direct, systematic, cumulative, multisensory method of introduction and practice to meet the specific needs of Kindergarten and first grade students struggling in reading.

The five components are:

1. Alphabet: the identification of letters, sequencing skills and alphabetizing.
2. Letter/sound knowledge: the direct instruction of individual letters and sounds, leading to the practice of reading words and sentences.
3. Phonological awareness: the explicit introduction of the relationships between speech-sound production, from rhyme to spelling.
4. Vocabulary: the direct teaching of strategies using context clues to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words.
5. Comprehension: the explicit teaching of specific learning strategies used to identify the basic components of a story.