The HELPS Program | Helping Early Literacy with Practice Strategies

A primary goal of the HELPS Program (and of The Helps Education Fund) is to make the HELPS Programs as accessible to teachers as possible. This accessibility includes providing teachers with convenient options for obtaining HELPS materials and training for free.

Although there are relative advantages to attending a live HELPS Workshop, attending a workshop is not always possible for teachers. Therefore, teachers who are unable to attend a HELPS Workshop should be able to successfully learn the HELPS One-on-One Program by carefully reading the Teacher's Manual, watching the HELPS Program Training Video , and completing all training exercises associated with the Manual and Video. Worthwhile to note: teachers are unlikely to implement HELPS in the most effective way possible if they do not read all sections of the Teacher's Manual and complete all training exercises from the Manual and Video. The training exercises and sequence of training steps were systematically developed from years of training teachers to use HELPS. The training steps described in the Teacher's Manual should therefore represent the most effective and efficient method of training.

Depending on each teacher's previous experience with the different HELPS procedures that are integrated within the Program, teachers learning the HELPS Program from the Teacher's Manual and Training Video will likely need 5 to 9.5 hours of training before being able to implement the HELPS One-on-One Program comfortably with students.

Increasingly, college professors have been using the HELPS Program as part of their teaching and training activities with undergraduate and graduate students entering educational fields. Read more to learn about some advantages of integrating HELPS as part of university training activities.

Although reading fluency is important for all students' reading development, instructional strategies designed to improve students' reading fluency are often missing from core reading curricula. In fact, approximately 40% of U.S. students are nonfluent readers.

Click the below link to watch how the HELPS One-on-One Program is implemented. This demonstration shows one full session of the HELPS One-on-One Program being implemented with a second grade student.