1st Grade Report Overview

The Open Court Reading Foundational Skills Kits for Grade 1 partially meet the expectations for alignment to standards and research-based practices for foundational skills instruction. Materials include sufficient and explicit instruction regarding features of a sentence, such as capitalization, punctuation, and word spacing; however, there is a lack of explicit information on how print concepts are taught with student materials. Materials provide teachers with systematic, explicit modeling for instruction in syllables, sounds, and spoken words, however the teacher does not explicitly teach distinguishing long from short vowel sounds without showing students vowel graphemes. Materials contain explicit instructions for systematic and repeated teacher modeling of all grade-level phonics standards. The materials include explicit, systematic teacher-level instruction of modeling that demonstrates the use of phonics to encode sounds to letters and words in writing tasks; however, students are provided with limited daily activities to practice encoding newly and previously taught sound patterns. Materials include some systematic and explicit instruction of high-frequency words. Materials include explicit instruction of word analysis strategies and some opportunities for explicit instruction and practice of word solving strategies to decode unfamiliar words. Materials provide systematic and explicit instruction and practice in fluency; however, fluency is modeled infrequently by the teacher. Materials do not provide explicit lessons for the teacher in confirming and self-correcting errors in fluency.