1st Grade Report Overview

The Grade 1 materials meet the expectations for alignment to standards and research-based practices for foundational skills instruction. Materials provide clear directions for the teacher around explicit instruction and modeling on how to correctly form all 26 of the uppercase and lowercase letters, though materials do not provide opportunities for students to practice forming all of the letters using a variety of multimodal and multisensory methods. Materials provide daily opportunities for students to practice phonological awareness skills, which are introduced with explicit teacher modeling, and provide teachers with explicit instructional routines, systematic and repeated modeling, and instruction for students to hear, say, encode, and read the newly taught grade-level phonics pattern, in addition to opportunities to decode phonetically spelled words. Materials contain teacher-level instruction and modeling for building, manipulating, spelling, and encoding words using common and newly-taught sound and spelling patterns of phonics. Materials provide frequent, explicit instruction of word analysis and decoding strategies and include frequent opportunities for both teacher explicit instruction and student practice in decoding text with accuracy and automaticity. Materials include a well-defined teacher resource for content presentation, which includes a detailed scope and sequence, a weekly planner, and detailed information and instructional routines that help the teacher to effectively implement all foundational skills content through session-specific teacher-scripted lessons. The program utilizes lesson plans that are research-based, including foundational concepts, such as phonological and phonemic awareness, alphabetic principles, phonics, and high-frequency words. Materials include a variety of decodable texts that contain grade-level phonics skills aligned to the program’s scope and sequence to address securing phonics. The lesson materials include lesson plans to teach and review previously taught high-frequency and irregularly spelled words.

Materials provide assessment opportunities over the course of the year to demonstrate students’ progress toward mastery and independence of print concepts, letter recognition, and letter formation, including checks for understanding within the lessons, weekly formative assessments, and unit summative assessments that measure student progress in word recognition and analysis. Materials provide regular support for differentiation and reteaching to students needing additional support. The Program Implementation includes a pacing guide with flexible options for whole-group and small-group instruction, along with sample schedules.