2nd Grade - Gateway 2

The materials reviewed for Grade 2 partially meet the criteria for foundational skills lessons are well-designed and take into account effective lesson structure and pacing. Content can reasonably be completed within a regular school year, and the pacing allows for maximum student understanding.

The OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, is designed to be implemented with a whole group of students according to a clear structure. According to the Program Overview, Small Group lessons are provided during Workshop time but there is no information about planning or implementing Workshop time in the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2. Units are designed to be taught within a given amount of time and each lesson should take one day, however evidence was found only in an ancillary Professional Development video for the suggested pacing of an individual lesson for Grades Kindergarten and 1. The Professional Development video did not include information pertaining to Grade 2. It takes 190 days to complete all lessons.

• Lesson plans utilize effective, research-based lesson plan design for early literacy instruction. Examples include, but are not limited to:

  • OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Teacher Edition, Research Library provides research by Marsha Roit, EdD, “Foundational Skills: Five Ways to Build the Cornerstone of Proficient Reading”. The author states that “Open Court has had a long and successful history of teaching the critical foundational skills using materials that integrate knowledge from research on the learning theory and cognitive science as well as language and literacy development combined with instructional practice and teacher expertise.” The references cited include R.L. Allington (2006), A.L. Archer & C.H.Hughes (2011), and L.C. Ehri (2002).

• The effective lesson design structure does not include both whole group and small group instruction. 

  • OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Program Overview, Page 6, Workshop Overview, addresses how workshop time for small group reading can be built into language arts time for 15-30 minutes only before or after core instruction which is the whole group instruction time.

  • OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Program Overview and daily lessons in regard to differentiation, suggests that differentiation can take place in small groups during the workshop time while other students are working on other activities (e.g., completing skills practice worksheet, reading decodable, practicing skills with eGames, work on inquiry, complete homework, reread selection, complete writing assignment).

• The pacing of each component of daily lesson plans is somewhat clear and appropriate. Examples include, but are not limited to: 

  • OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Program Overview addresses the possible time allotted to the Workshop but the expected total time for a day of lesson activities was not noted in the teacher edition nor was there a breakdown of time for each skill.

  • No information about daily pacing at Grade 2 was found.

• The suggested amount of time and expectations for maximum student understanding of all foundational skill content (i.e., phonics, irregularly spelled words, word analysis, fluency) can reasonably be completed in one school year and should not require modifications. 

  • OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, has six units each with six lessons to be completed over thirty days. There is also a Getting Started Unit which takes ten days. The entire Scope and Sequence requires 190 school days to complete.

  • OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Scope and Sequence in the resource library show the skills needed can be completed within one year.

The materials reviewed for Grade 2 partially meet the criteria for materials regularly and systematically offer assessment opportunities that measure student progress of phonics (as indicated by the program scope and sequence).

Materials include a variety of assessment opportunities such as diagnostic, benchmark, unit, and daily assessments in which students demonstrate their mastery of decoding skills. The OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2 does not include assessment results guidance in the following area: concrete instructional suggestions on how to support students’ progress toward mastery.

Examples include but are not limited to:

• Materials provide resources and tools to collect ongoing data about students’ progress in phonics. 

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Teacher Edition, Resource Library, Assessment, Assessment Book, the phonics assessments cover decoding and encoding. Decoding ability in context is measured under Reading Prosody in the Oral Fluency assessments.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Teacher Edition, Resource Library, Assessment, Diagnostic Assessment Book, covers phonics and decoding. The Oral Reading Fluency assessments rate decoding ability under Reading Prosody.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Diagnostic Assessment, there are two Phonics and Decoding assessments in which students are to identify the given word in a wordlist and two Oral Reading Fluency assessments.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Benchmark Assessment, Test 1, Phonics, students select words that have the same sound as the given word.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Benchmark Assessment, Test 2, Oral Fluency Passage Reading, students read a passage with two hundred one words.

• Materials offer assessment opportunities to determine students’ progress in phonics that are implemented systematically.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Assessment, each unit has five lesson-level assessments that primarily focus on out-of-context phonics skills and each unit has one unit assessment that includes one oral reading fluency assessment.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Teacher Edition, Unit Planner for each unit indicates when assessments are done. For example, Unit 4, Lesson 3, Unit Planner, Assessment column, notes Formal Lesson Assessment pages 53-55. The assessment covers the phonics skills covered in the lesson, /o/ spelled ow, oa, o, o_e, and /u/ spelled ew, ue, u, u_e, and also word analysis for prefixes dis- and un-.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Teacher Edition, Unit Planner for each unit indicates when assessments are done. For example, Unit 5, Lesson 2, Unit Planner, Assessment column, notes Formal Lesson Assessment pages 70-71 and informal assessment of blending with Unit 5, eActivity: Lesson 2, Foundational Skills, Blending. An informal assessment of word analysis is done with U5 eGame: Lesson 2, Foundational Skills.

• Multiple assessment opportunities are provided regularly for students to demonstrate progress toward mastery and independence with phonics.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Teacher Edition, Resource Library, Assessment, Benchmark Assessment Book, each of the three Benchmark Assessments covers both decoding and encoding. Decoding in context is measured three times per year in this assessment.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Teacher Edition, Resource Library, Assessment, Assessment Book, decoding ability in context is measured under Reading Prosody in the Oral Fluency assessments.

  • In Unit 1, Lesson 1, students choose the correct spelling of words with the following graphemes: ch, th, sh, wh, and ar.

  • In Unit 4, Lesson 4, students choose the correct word from the following word bank to complete the sentence: bloom, room, hoop, soon, and boot.

  • In Unit 6, Lesson 5, students write the sound the spelling pattern makes in each word (i.e., /oo/, /aw/ /ow/, or /u/).

• Assessment materials provide teachers and students with information about students’ current skills/level of understanding of phonics.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Assessment, Performance Expectations: Lesson and Unit Assessments, 80 percent mastery is considered an acceptable level of mastery (e.g., four out of five items correct).

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Assessment, Performance Expectations: Unit Assessment, Phonics, Acceptable Correct for Units 1 and 3: 40 out of 50 points. Unit 2: 32 out of 40 points. 

• Materials genuinely measure students’ progress to somewhat support teachers with instructional adjustments to help students make progress toward mastery in phonics.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Benchmark Assessment, SRA Open Court Reading Foundational Skills Benchmark Assessment Overview, Diagnosis, the directives state that if students score below the cutoff for any Benchmark Assessment, the teacher should use one or more of the following general suggestions to help students get back on track: reteach students who need extra help, practice opportunities are available to students within the Skills Practice Workbooks, Decodable books, eGames, and Language Arts Handbook, differentiate Instruction during Workshop, and intervention should be assigned to students who need more intensive help.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Teacher Edition, Benchmark Assessment, page v, provides only general suggestions for each of the three skill areas assessed.

The materials reviewed for Grade 2 partially meet the criteria for materials regularly and systematically offer assessment opportunities that measure student progress of word recognition and analysis (as indicated by the program scope and sequence).

Materials provide a variety of assessment opportunities over the course of the year. Points of assessment are indicated in the Unit Planner and Teacher Edition. Assessments are provided in the Assessment Book, Diagnostic Assessment Book, and the Benchmark Assessment Book. The Assessment Blackline Masters provide student copies of each assessment. Teachers are provided with both a Student Assessment Record and a Class Assessment Record. Students use eActivities and eGames for informal assessment. A Teacher Resource Book with interventions is provided but not cross-referenced with each assessment. There is a lack of direct, explicit information on how to provide intervention based on each assessment.

Examples include but are not limited to:

• Materials regularly and systematically provide a variety of assessment opportunities over the course of the year to demonstrate students’ progress toward mastery and independence of word recognition (high-frequency words or irregularly spelled words) and analysis.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Teacher Edition, Unit Planner for each unit indicates when assessments are conducted. For example, Unit 2, Unit Planner, Lesson 5, Day 5 indicates that Assessment pages 26-27 will be given.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Foundational Skills Benchmark Assessment, each benchmark assessment has a word analysis assessment given three times throughout the year.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Assessment, Units 4-6 have a word analysis reading assessment.

  • In Unit 6, Lesson 2, Day 5, Monitor Progress, Formal Assessment, pages 87-88, assesses Phonics: Silent Letters (island, answer, shine, build, listen) and Word Analysis: Prefixes dis-, un-, and non-.

• Assessment materials provide teachers and students with information concerning students’ current skills/level of understanding of word recognition and word analysis. 

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Teacher Edition, Resources, Assessment, Diagnostic Assessment Book, is provided to help teachers identify student strengths, weaknesses, and areas of concern in the following areas: Phonemic Awareness, Phonics and Decoding, Spelling, Oral Reading Fluency. The Diagnostic Assessment can be used as an initial screener with individual students or groups of students who might be lacking the prerequisite skills for the grade level. The information from the Diagnostic Assessment can then be used to inform instruction in those specific areas. 

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Teacher Edition, Resources, Assessment, Benchmark Assessment Book, pages iii and v, notes that the Benchmark Assessment “...has two major components: 100-Point Skills Battery and Oral Fluency. The 100-Point Skills Battery component samples skills from three strands within the grade-level curriculum: Phonics, Word Analysis, and Spelling... Because each of the Benchmark Assessments is equivalent in difficulty and format, they provide a means for measuring the progress of all students in a classroom over the course of the academic year. Improving total scores on the Benchmark Assessments indicate a student’s increasing mastery of the foundational skills curriculum.”

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Foundational Skills Benchmark Assessment, Benchmark Assessment Record Sheet, provides the teacher with the goal for each benchmark assessment (i.e. 30).

• Materials support teachers with limited instructional suggestions for assessment-based steps to help students to progress toward mastery in word recognition and word analysis.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Teacher Edition, Resources, Assessment, Benchmark Assessment Book, page v, provides general suggestions to help students. The materials state, “If students score below the cutoff for any Benchmark Assessment, use one or more of the following to help students get back on track: 

    • Reteach students who need extra help 

    • Practice opportunities are available to students within the Skills Practice Workbooks, Leveled Readers (Approaching Level), eGames, and Language Arts Handbook 

    • Differentiate Instruction during Workshop 

    • Intervention should be assigned to students who need more intensive help.”

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Foundational Skills Benchmark Assessment, Diagnosis, the directives are for students who score below benchmark are as follows: reteach students who need extra help, use Skills Practice Workbooks, differentiate during Workshop, and assign students to intervention who need intensive help.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Teacher Edition, Resources, Assessment, Assessment Book, Benchmark Assessment Book, Diagnostic Assessment Book, there is no evidence for the assessment of reading or identifying high-frequency or irregularly spelled words.

The materials reviewed for Grade 2 partially meet the criteria for materials regularly and systematically offer assessment opportunities that measure student progress in fluency (as indicated by the program scope and sequence).

Materials provide multiple assessment opportunities for fluency as noted in the Unit Planner of each unit. In the Assessment Book, each of the six units includes an Oral Fluency Assessment. The assessments score reading rate and accuracy and also reading prosody. The Diagnostic Assessment can be used with an individual student or groups of students and the Oral Reading Fluency strand measures Reading Rate and Accuracy and also Reading Prosody. The Benchmark Assessment is administered three times per year and measures and measures oral fluency: passage reading fluency. A Teacher Resource Book with interventions is provided but not cross-referenced with each assessment. There are also differentiated teaching ideas in the teacher edition but there is a lack of direct, explicit information on how to provide intervention based on each assessment.

Examples include but are not limited to:

• Multiple assessment opportunities are provided regularly and systematically over the course of the year in core materials for students to demonstrate progress toward mastery and independence of fluency.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Teacher Edition, Resource Library, Assessment Book, each of the six units includes an Oral Fluency Assessment. The assessments score reading rate and accuracy and also reading prosody. 

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Teacher Edition, Resource Library, Assessment Book, the Diagnostic Assessment has an Oral Reading Fluency component. The Diagnostic Assessment can be used as an initial screener with an individual student or groups of students. The Oral Reading Fluency Assessment covers reading rate, accuracy, and prosody.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Teacher Edition, Resource Library, Assessment, Benchmark Assessment, is administered three times per year and measures oral fluency: passage reading.

• Assessment materials provide teachers and students with information about students' current skills/level of understanding of fluency.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Assessment, Performance Expectations: Oral Fluency Assessment, students must meet the following Words Per Minute (WPM) benchmarks to meet grade-level expectations: 84 (Unit 1), 92 (Unit 2), 100 (Unit 3), 109 (Unit 4), 116 (Unit 5), and 124 (Unit 6). 

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Resource Library, Assessment Book, page vi, notes expected fluency (words correct per minute) for each unit. The end-of-year expectation for students for prosody is four of five prosody elements in the average range.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Resource Library, Assessment, Benchmark Assessment, page iv, provides cutoff points for the three assessment periods for high-frequency word reading fluency and oral passage reading fluency. On page v, Diagnosis, it is noted that if a student falls below the cutoff score on the Oral Fluency assessments they should be considered for intervention and should be closely monitored. Page iv notes, “The Oral Fluency portion of the Benchmark Assessment is a direct measure of students’ reading fluency. It also serves as a general, overall indicator of a student's reading competence. For example, students who score poorly when reading text aloud in a fixed time are the same students who have poor decoding skills, whose ability to recognize words automatically is adequate, who have limited vocabularies, and who have difficulty understanding what they read.”

• Materials support teachers with limited instructional adjustments to help students make progress toward mastery in fluency.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Diagnostic Assessment, page iii, indicates that students who score below the expected level on any of the technical skill areas will need to remedy this through additional scaffolding and support provided in Intervention.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Resource Library, Assessment, Benchmark Assessment, page v, “If students score below the cutoff for any Benchmark Assessment, use one or more of the following to help students get back on track: Reteach, practice opportunities are available to students within the Skills Practice Workbooks, Leveled Readers, (Approaching Level), eGames, and Language Arts Handbook, Differentiate Instruction during Workshop, Intervention should be assigned to students who need more intensive help.” The Language Arts Handbook and Workshop guidance are not found in the OCR Foundational Skills Teacher Edition, Grade 1.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Diagnostic Assessment, page iii, students who score below the expected level on any of the technical skill areas will need to remedy this through additional scaffolding and support provided in Intervention. These are only general suggestions.

  • In Unit 2, Lesson, 1, Day 2, Phonics and Decoding, Fluency: Reading a Decodable Book, Differentiated Instruction, the directions tell the teacher if students need extra practice, have them read “A Fake Snake”. 

  • In Unit 5, Lesson, 2, Day 2, Phonics and Decoding, Fluency: Reading a Decodable Book, Building Fluency, Teacher Tip, the directions tell the teacher if students are not ready to read the story without structure, revert to using Routine 9.

The materials reviewed for Grade 2 partially meet the criteria for materials regularly provide all students, including those who read, write, speak, or listen below grade level with extensive opportunities for reteaching to meet or exceed grade-level standards.

Materials provide guidance to teachers for scaffolding and adapting lessons and activities to support students who read, write, speak, or listen below grade level, or at the OCR “Approaching Level”. Each digital lesson has a toggle that can be switched on for differentiation support strategies and lesson extensions/adaptations. These activities can also be found in the Differentiated Instruction Guide in the Resource Library. The Program Overview refers to small groups as part of Workshop time, but there is no guidance in the Foundational Skills Kit that explains how or when to do Workshop small groups. Although the program overview indicates differentiated instruction occurs in small group settings, and differentiated instruction guides are provided in daily lessons, no mention of changing from the whole group to small group exists in the digital guide.

Examples include but are not limited to:

• Materials provide opportunities for small group reteaching. 

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Teacher Edition, Resource Library, Program Overview, page 7, refers to Workshop time to allow for small groups, but there is no elaboration of this in the lessons.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Teacher Edition, Resource Library, Program Overview, page 21, indicates that differentiated instruction tips in the teacher guide should be used in small groups, but these do not show up in the lessons.

  • In Unit 5, Lesson 2, Day 1, the teacher introduces decoding and the /ow/ spelled ow and ou in the whole group lesson. Materials include a differentiated instruction guide with explicit instructions for the teacher to give reminders, use whole-word blending and blending sentence routines, and provide syllabication for words. 

• Materials provide guidance to teachers for scaffolding and adapting lessons and activities to support students who read, write, speak, or listen below grade level in extensive opportunities to learn foundational skills at the grade-level standards.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Teacher Edition, Resource Library, Intervention, Differentiated Instruction Guide, contains all of the leveled lesson differentiation that can be accessed individually in the Digital Teacher Edition including an “Approaching Level”.

  • In Unit 2, Lesson 2, Day 3, Developing Oral Language, materials include a differentiated instruction guide with questions the teacher can ask students and instructs the teacher to have students use all words in the lesson at least one time.

  • In Unit 6, Lesson 3, Day 4, Developing Oral Language, the teacher reviews the prefixes re-, pre-, and mis- with the whole group. Materials include a differentiated instruction guide with instructions to write three lines of words and a routine to read using syllabication, definitions, and sentences for each word.

The materials reviewed for Grade 2 partially meet the criteria for materials regularly provide extensions and/or more advanced opportunities for students who read, write, speak, or listen above grade level.

Materials provide a Supplemental Word List in the Appendix found in the Resource Library to extend learning in the lesson. The Program Overview references lessons containing detailed suggestions for differentiated instruction for those Beyond Level. Although there is a toggle switch for differentiated learning in the digital teacher edition, differentiation for Beyond Level was noted in the printed teacher edition labeled as Beyond Level at the bottom margin. The differentiated activities for Beyond Level are only evident in the print Teacher Edition, not the Digital Teacher Edition. Many of the above-grade-level activities are not seen as doing more than their classmates,but rather different activities based on skill level.

Examples include but are not limited to:

• Materials provide multiple opportunities for advanced students to investigate grade-level foundational skills at a greater depth.

  • In the OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Resource Library, Appendix, Supplemental Word List, can be used in several ways to extend the lessons. Words are listed by beginning sounds, ending sounds, and medial vowel sounds.

  • In OCR Foundational Skills Kit, Grade 2, Resource Library, Program Overview, every lesson contains detailed suggestions for differentiating instruction for the following groups of students: Approaching Level, On Level, and Beyond Level (this is seen in the print materials, but not the online materials).

  • In Unit 3, Lesson 2, Day 1, printed version, Beyond Level students list additional words with long /e/ spelled -ie, y, and ey.

  • In Unit 5, Lesson 5, Day 1, printed version, students Beyond Level extend sentences with /oi/ words compared to rewriting sentences with words from the lesson.

• There are no instances of advanced students simply doing more assignments than their classmates.

  • In Unit 2, Lesson 1, Day 1, Differentiated Instruction, High - Frequency Words, at the Approaching Level, students draw an illustration for several words in the word lines. For On Level, students write a poem using words from the word lines. For Beyond Level, students list words that have three or more syllables and include /ā/.

  • In Unit 5, Lesson 1, Day 1, Differentiated Instruction, Word Lines Teacher, the students Beyond Level list words that have three or more syllables and include /ā/ spelled a or a_e.

  • In Unit 6, Lesson 1, Day 3, On Level students write a list of additional words and their definitions, while students Beyond Level identify homophone pairs and write sentences for each word.