Hi Mary,

I was waiting to see if other cohort members had some advice based on their own experience. I figured I should now provide some advice.

At the 6th grade level, it sounds like they have a long way to go with their skills based on what you shared. I would suggest adding explicit letter sound instruction into a decoding intervention that is appropriate for them. At this grade level, I would also suggest that you either use an ipad app to build words or even have the students make the words with letter tiles instead of magnetic letters. 

Also, I would suggest that you partner a decoding intervention with Supported Cloze using connected text that includes the type of decoding skill you are working on.

I hope that helps a bit. I am happy to discuss this further if needed.

-Kathy