Headfirst - a blog for primary teachers by a first grade teacher

The Science of Reading is the collection of extensive research that tell us the most effective way to teach reading. (Read more here: The Reading League). In kindergarten and first grade, a main part of this is PHONICS instruction. In this post, I will teach you the recommended parts of a daily phonics lesson.

Researchers recommend that you allot 30-45 minutes daily to phonics instruction. In this block, you are teaching foundational skills for decoding words. Decoding is breaking the code of the English language, also known as sounding out words. Balanced Literacy (now a bad word in the world of literacy instruction) pushed the thought that we could use the pictures and the context clues to essentially guess what unknown words are. This is called the 3-cueing system (anyone remember the Beanie Baby reading strategies?--read more about that here: The Reading League.) This 3-cueing system should be eliminated from beginning reading instruction for good. The only cue we need to give a stuck reader is: SOUND OUT THE WORD!

Since most educators did not learn all of this in college (shame on our teacher prep programs), my goal is to educate and make it as simple as possible to follow the research in your explicit phonics instruction.

Below I have given you a peek into my SOR aligned kindergarten phonics lesson slides. HERE IS A FREE WEEK TO TRY IT OUT! The slide examples are not all from the same lesson. This is a project that I am working on and will be adding to as I complete and tweak the lessons as I teach them this year.

The first part of a phonics lesson should be telling the students the goal of the lesson.

This introduction to the lesson follows the good teaching practice of stating the objective of the lesson.

Next up is phonological awareness. To learn more about what this it, click here: phonological awareness. The most recent research says that the main focus of phonological awareness should be on blending and segmenting, and that it should be a relatively short chunk of time. A curriculum like Heggerty is probably overkill. I have used and am a fan of Tools 4 Learning by Mary E. Dahlgren, Ed.D. This program was acquired by 95 Percent Group. Click below to see it on their website.

Spiral review has been a long-used, highly effective practice to review previous learning before adding to it. The is also sometimes called interleaved practice. In phonics lessons, this can be done through drills like using flashcards. My review slides are like digital flashcards.

This includes reviewing sight words or heart words.

After reviewing previous learning, it is time to add new learning. One of the most important parts of explicit phonics instruction is using a logical scope and sequence. Here is what I use:

Click to download the freebie.

As you can see, it is very scripted which is what makes it explicit. Students need to be taught these skills. We tried learning through exposure with Balanced Literacy. It didn't work. Explict phonics instruction does work!

Of course the reason for reading is to understand. We can teach and expand the vocabulary included in the other parts of the lesson. Using real pictures is the best way to help students make mental images of what words mean. The sentence we will be reading together is 'We went to the shop.'

The guided practice can look different depending on the objective of the lesson and how many days students have been exposed to the concept. My scope and sequence allows 2-5 days for each concept. This guided practice is showing students that in plural words that have t and p, the s says /s/ and in words that have g, n, and b, the s says /z/.

Here is another type of guided practice from a later lesson in the year on /sh/.

Phonics lessons need many opportunities for students to decode and encode words with the new concept. Decoding is reading and encoding is spelling.

Using manipulative letters like magnet letters are another way for extended practice. The teacher talk is alternating between having the student decode and encode for practice on both.

These trays are dollar store cookie sheets. I wrote the alphabet on them with sharpie. The letters came from here: Abecedarian ABC, LLC

When students are just learning letter sounds, the dictation can simply be individual letters like this:

Click to see this resource in my store.

Later, you can dictate words. I like to use Elkonin boxes for dictation. Here is a sound mapping mat I use:

Click to get it for free.

Here is another example of dictation of heart words:

This girl loved to pretend her name was Barbie! :)

As students learn more, you can dictate sentences.
Here is a dictation paper freebie with different sizes of lines to accommodate different skill levels:

Reading text is the final part of a phonics lesson. Some experts recommend reading multiple sentences and passages as soon as students know enough letter sounds and heart words to make sentences. As a classroom teacher, I have tried this, and it was very frustrating for my students. I also struggle with pushing kids too much too fast. So, I have chosen to delay this until the second half of kindergarten and only for those who are ready. There are many decodables becoming available. Here are some that I have used successfully.

UFLI

My Nerdy Teacher

Deedee Wills

This part of the lesson is for practice of all the skills new readers are learning. PLEASE use decodables instead of leveled readers in kindergarten and first grade. Leveled readers are part of Balanced Literacy and are not helpful to beginning readers who are learning to decode.

Comprehension should not be taught using decodables. These simple texts are not challenging enough to improve comprehension skills. Use read-alouds to teach comprehension. I will address this in a future blog post.

I hope this helps you along your SOR journey!

The Science or Reading has become a big buzzword in education in the last couple of years. But what does it mean? The Science of Reading is a body of research done over several decades. This research has been done by many different researchers in many different places. Collectively, some major ideas have been proven to be effective with regards to reading instruction. These ideas are being used now to write curriculum and inform teachers about how they can teach reading in the way that most students can learn.

As an early childhood educator, I am most interested in beginning reading instruction and what the research says about this. I was lucky enough to be LETRS trained this past year. If you get a chance to take this training, DO IT! I learned so much that I wish I had known earlier in my career. It was better than what I learned during my master's program in language and literacy!

There were things that I already knew and was implementing that were confirmed, and there were things I learned that I needed to change in my instruction. Here are my take aways!

THE most important part of beginning reading instruction is teaching phonics. It is how you teach students to decode the words. If you are not convinced of this, I'm sorry but you are wrong. The research is unwavering on this finding. If you find it boring and don't want to teach it, you need to go to a higher grade because beginning readers MUST learn phonics.

In addition, phonics must be taught in a systematic and sequential way. This ensures that students do not have gaps in their breaking of the code. We used to think the English language was so haphazard that phonics instruction was just one part of learning to read. Here is a quote from the "Logic of English" that dispels this myth:

When you hear 'systematic and sequential', this is what it means. In kindergarten through second grade, tier 1 (the whole class) instruction should include phonics instruction covering the following letters, sounds, and patterns. The scope will overlap year to year to ensure mastery of the concepts.

These are available in one file here: K-2 Phonics Scope and Sequence.

There are many good phonics programs out there. A few I know of are UFLI, Fundations, and 95% Group. I am currently using UFLI in kindergarten with AMAZING results. Although I will only teach through consonant digraphs, nearly all of my students are reading and spelling CVC and words with consonant clusters consistently. #teacherproud

Phonemic awareness research has been around since the 1970s. I learned about it in college in the early 1990s. It is often misunderstood, so here is a refresher on phonemic awareness and why it is important in early reading instruction.

Phonemes are the smallest units of language. They are the individual sounds that make up words. Different languages have different phonemes. At birth, we are wired to produce them all. But over time, as children are exposed to language, their ability to produce all the phonemes is reduced. This is why it is easier to learn a foreign language at a very young age than in high school as our school system currently does.

Typically developing children can hear and produce these phonemes but need to become aware of how they are made with their mouths and airflow and where in words they appear. Using a handheld mirror during phonemic awareness and phonics activities is very helpful. Speech therapists have been doing this for years but teachers are just now learning about this tool.

Reading Rockets is a great website created by teachers who work with struggling readers. Read more about phonemic awareness on their site here:

Basics: Phonological and Phonemic Awareness.

The gist is, students needs to learn that speech is made up of sentences, individual words, word parts (like syllables and affixes), and individual sounds. The sentences, words, and word parts learning is known as phonological awareness and the individual sound awareness is phonemic awareness. It is a small distinction, but important when you are teaching it to students. This is a great graphic from LD@school.

Dr. Michael Heggerty, a first grade teacher, wrote a commonly used phonemic (actually phonological and phonemic) awareness teaching manual in 2003 that has been used by many teachers, including myself. However, research has found that his materials were a bit of overkill. Each daily lesson covers several phonological and phonemic awareness concepts, probably designed to compensate for different levels of students. Research has shown that smaller time frames on specific skills are more effective than the 20-30 minutes Heggerty's materials would take.

The most effective part of beginning awareness is to be able to tap words out into individual sounds and, conversely, blend individual sounds into words. We first start with two sounds, then three, then four and so on. Rhyming, alliteration, and syllable devision are not as important as previously thought, so it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of time on these aspects.

Phoneme isolation is being able to hear and identify individual sounds. Standardized tests and screeners given to students often have a test that targets this. When looking for students with possible reading difficulties, this skill is a great predictor, even more than knowing letter names and sounds.

Recent research has found that combining phonemic awareness instruction with letters has an even more powerful impact. Here is a video showing that.

We have known for years that the number of books read to a young child before they enter kindergarten is the number 1 predictor of reading success. But WHY? The reason is listening comprehension.

The ultimate goal of reading is understanding what is read, also known as reading comprehension. We used to think that we could effectively teach reading comprehension right alongside beginning reading instruction. This is NOT true. The reading materials that beginning readers use are not suitable for increasing comprehension. They just aren't deep enough! Questions you can ask and discussions you can have on 'Jim got a big dog. The dog has a red dish.' are not rigorous. There is no reading between the lines.

Therefore, we must read TO children to improve their listening comprehension which will lead to good reading comprehension when they are ready to read text that is meaty enough to challenge their understanding.

Of course teachers have always known that reading to children was important, both at home and in their classrooms. One thing we need to improve upon though, is the kind of books we are reading and what we do in addition to just reading the words. Fiction is great and has many important uses in the classroom. However, it is overused. Children need to acquire vocabulary and knowledge to be good readers and that means we need to be reading a lot of nonfiction to them. Good readers have background knowledge to help them understand what they are reading.

Vocabulary expansion can be done in different ways but using books with rich vocabulary and teaching it ahead of time is a great one. Showing the word and having pictures explaining it give students a visual picture to attach the word to. Then when you read it in the text, remind them of what the word means. Having students use the vocabulary in their speaking and writing helps cement these words further.

After the whole language movement, teachers had a hard time giving up the idea that students learn to read using whole words, especially if they are harder to sound out. This led to the Balanced Literacy era which is still alive and well and being used in many schools across the country. Balanced--it sounds good. But don't be fooled. It has a teaching strategy that has been detrimental to many readers and has led our country to have disturbing amounts of high school students and adults who cannot read proficiently.

You may not have heard of the 3 cueing method but you may have or still be using it. When a reader comes to a word he doesn't know, he should Cue #1 look at the picture. If that doesn't help, he should Cue #2 say the first sound. If he still doesn't get it, he should Cue #3 say a word that makes sense. This 3 cueing system has lead to readers who don't use the sounds in the word to decode it. More often than not, they just guess. This works sometimes, especially if they are a good reader who is reading something beyond their level, and they are good at using context clues. However, beginning readers do not fit this profile. They don't have enough knowledge to guess correctly, and this leads to poor comprehension. They automatically guess and try to go on instead of attacking the word. The first and only cue we should be giving readers is to SOUND OUT THE WORD. To sound the word out, they need those phonics skills!!!

One component of Balanced Literacy that is still widely used are leveled readers. These books use a leveling system (that isn't very accurate) to put levels on books. The problem with these books is that they do not take phonics skills into account. The vocabulary is controlled, but they use many "sight words" and expect the pictures to help students figure out more complex words. At the beginning, these books are very predictable and sound like the child is really reading. However, they are not decoding the words, just memorizing what they say (or they think they say).

Instead of leveled readers, beginning readers need decodable readers. These can be books or passages or even just sentences that use the phonics skills they have been taught (and some sight words) so that they can practice sounding out words. This controlled vocabulary, as you can imagine, makes the text even less vocabulary-rich. Thus, these are used to practice decoding, and comprehension is best taught by listening to books.

This is just the basics of the Structured Literacy movement. Here are some books that I recommend reading to help you on your journey. And this podcast was AMAZING!