1st Grade Report Overview

The materials for Grade 1 partially meet the expectations for alignment to research-based practices and standards for foundational skills instruction.

The materials include a clear, evidence-based hierarchy for phonemic awareness instruction and practice. Materials include phonemic awareness activities such as isolating, blending, and segmenting words as part of a warm-up for 8-12 minutes. Daily phonemic awareness lessons end after Week 24; Weeks 23–30 include optional phonemic awareness intervention lessons. The scope and sequence includes phonemic awareness skills aligned to phonics instruction progression and include opportunities for students to practice connecting sounds to letters. Materials include limited explicit instruction for the teacher to model different types of phonemic awareness activities. Instead, the teacher is guided to begin student practice without modeling first. The materials include access to summative and formative phonemic awareness; however, these are optional.

The materials do not contain elements of instruction that are based on the three-cueing system for teaching decoding. The materials include a clearly delineated scope and sequence with a cohesive, intentional sequence of phonics instruction that builds from simpler to more complex skills while also building towards the application of skills. However, the materials have a limited evidence-based explanation for the order of the phonics sequence. The materials include reasonable pacing of newly taught phonics skills. The Instructional Time Guide includes information for the pacing of daily lessons. The Bridge to Reading foundational skills lessons include 20-30 minutes of phonics instruction. The timing of the phonemic awareness and phonics components is indicated in the header of the lesson plans.

The materials contain explicit instructions for systematic and repeated teacher modeling of phonics skills. The materials include a structured, consistent blending routine with teacher modeling, specifically the Finger-Blending Strategy. The materials include instructions for the dictation of words and sentences. The materials provide limited guidance on corrective feedback. The materials provide students with frequent opportunities to decode and encode words with taught phonics patterns through guided practice in the We Do portion of the lesson. The materials introduce spelling rules and generalizations in regular instructional routines in a sequence aligned to the phonics scope and sequence. The materials include decodable texts aligned to the phonics scope and sequence, including passages in the READ books and a Decodables library; however, the texts in the Decodables Library are briefly mentioned in the lesson plans, and there are no lesson plans for these texts. The materials indicate that these texts are intended to support small group or independent reading practice without clear guidance for use and implementation. The materials include weekly formative assessments in the form of Weekly Checks. These checks include encoding words in isolation and in the context of a sentence. The Weekly Checks do not include decoding tasks.

The materials include consistent instructional routines to introduce high-frequency words, beginning in Week 1, with five weeks of dedicated review at the end of the year. Materials include teacher modeling of the spelling and reading of high-frequency words that includes connecting the phonemes to the graphemes. The materials provide consistent opportunities for students to engage in practice reading high-frequency words in isolation and in the context of sentences and decodable passages. Although there are opportunities for students to write words in sentences, word banks are included for student use to choose from when writing the high-frequency word. Lessons include explicit instruction in syllable patterns and affixes, and students have frequent opportunities to apply word analysis skills to decode unfamiliar words. The materials include a Weekly Check during which students write the week’s Red Words in the context of a sentence. The materials do not include assessments of word recognition or word analysis. 

The materials include limited opportunities for explicit, systematic instruction in oral reading fluency. Teachers use weekly stories from sound posters to provide students with general information about the habits of fluent readers and to model fluent reading. Students practice fluent reading independently using word lists, sentences, and decodable text passages. Materials include limited assessment opportunities over the course of the year for students to demonstrate progress toward mastery and independence of oral reading fluency. The materials include a Fluency Checklist for the teacher to use to assess fluency weekly using the Day 4 decodable reader.