Academics Program – The Upper Bridge Program has a school-wide framework integrating the California State Standards into the curriculum. Instruction in core areas uses a balanced comprehensive program with a strategic selection of methodologies and curriculum. Explicit teaching is integrated with experiential learning to provide meaningful instruction.

The instructional focus and delivery design changes by grade level. Given the individual learning differences it is difficult to predict the academic achievement of the students. Through intensive remediation students are provided with the means to develop basic skills or remediate core skills.

The Middle School curriculum continues the diagnostic/intervention curriculum along with functional academic skills. The Bridge curriculum offers applied academic skills recognizing a necessary balance of academics and functional skills for the students to achieve their potential.

The High School curriculum is progressively more functional in its content. Remediation in core subjects is still evident in the curriculum but more emphasis is placed on accommodations and alternative skills to achieve independence.

Research-Based Literacy Interventions – A systematic approach is used to explicitly teach word identification, including phonemic awareness and phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Using formal and informal assessments, students are provided with the reading instruction to meet their needs. Students are placed in ability-based groups. The instruction is individualized and specific to their needs. On-going assessments allow for adjustments as needed in the educational delivery.

Language
Language is designed to teach students all the essential skills of reading, language comprehension, and composition in a cumulative, sequential curriculum. This research-based program provides the vital foundations that enable fluent reading to develop. Students are taught the basic orthographic phonological and morphological processing skills that would unlock for them the mystery of print. They learn about sounds, spellings, and syllables in a systematic manner as they start on the road to becoming confident, independent readers.

SRA Corrective Reading
SRA Corrective Reading provides intensive direct instruction-based reading intervention for students in Grades 3-Adult who are reading below grade level. It is a research based curriculum that follows the direct instruction approach. Direct Instruction (DI) is a highly structured approach to instruction designed to accelerate the learning of at-risk students. SRA incorporates explicit instructional strategies, coordinated instructional sequences, ample practice opportunities for a good balance between skills instruction & literature, and aligned student materials.

Visualizing/Verbalizing
Gander Publishing
The Visualizing/Verbalizing process is delivered in a series of specific steps. The imaging process moves from small units of language to larger units of language – first for a word, then to sentences, paragraphs, pages, and chapters.

Students are taught how to connect visual imagery to language in a sequenced series of steps as follows: (1) Picture to Picture. Here the student is presented with pictures and is then asked to describe them using “structure words” of what, size, color, number, shape, where, movement, mood, background, perspective, when and sound. The objective is to have the student develop fluent verbalizing of a real image “Choice and contrast” questions are used to stimulate appropriate verbalizing and thinking. (2) Word Imaging. In this step, the student describes his/her own internal images for familiar, high-imagery words in order to be able to explain it to someone (structure words are used to assist this). (3) Sentence by Sentence Imaging. The teacher assists the student in the creation of images for paragraphs of longer duration. The process starts receptively (teacher reads to the student) and moves to an expressive mode (student reads to him/herself). The student places a colored square on the table once s/he has an image for the sentence. Once the paragraph is completed, the student is asked for a “picture summary” and then a “word summary.” (5) Sentence by Sentence with Interpretation. At this level, higher-order thinking skills can be stimulated since the individual, by this time, is making clearer internal “gestalts” or ”imogens” for the information that is being listened to or read. (6) Multiple Sentencing Imaging, Paragraph Imaging, Paragraph by Paragraph Imaging. The student is now challenged with information that is both longer and denser. Extensions and overlaps into writing and note-taking take place as appropriate for the individual’s needs and processing ability.