2nd Grade - Gateway 1

The materials reviewed for Grade 2 partially meet the criteria for materials provide frequent opportunities for students to practice decoding phonetically regular words in a sentence. 

Students have opportunities to read regular words in a sentence during the Blending Routine, as well as during the Reader’s Theatre activities. During each day’s blending lesson, students have the opportunity to practice decoding phonetically regular words in a sentence. Students also have opportunities to decode words in sentences during some of the passage readings. The Teacher’s Guide provides explicit routines for teachers to use in blending words. Early in the program, students reread the same passages daily each week. Later in the program, the students begin reading different passages daily. The correlated readings in the Learner’s Notebook provide differentiated assignments for students who are below grade level and students who are on or above grade level. Although the materials provide frequent decoding practice opportunities for students, the program does not provide teachers with explicit instruction on teaching students how to decode words in context.  

Materials provide explicit, systematic practice for decoding phonetically regular words in a sentence. Examples include, but are not limited to:

• In the Teacher’s Guide, page I-20, the Blending Routine provides guidance for the teacher on how to explicitly model the blending of words. On page I-21, the materials further prompt the teacher on introducing the sentence of the day with the following directions: “Review any challenging words with the students, modeling word attack strategies (e.g., the blending routine).” The teacher then instructs students to silently read the sentence before cuing the students to “chorally read the sentence while touching below each word.” 
• In the Teacher’s Guide, page 129, the teacher uses the Blending Routine for the words: alive, arrive, active, brighter, tighter, biter, tipping, type, typewriter. The teacher discusses the long i pattern.  Students read the sentences, “There are many types of felines. Large felines include lions, tigers, and jaguars.”
• The sentence practice included in the Teacher’s Guide and the Fluency Notebook passages provide limited correlation to words presented in the daily Blending Routing lesson.  For example:
• In the Teacher’s Guide, page 36, the program incorporates instruction on reading two sentences within the Blending Routine. The focus elements for the week are ch, sh, wh, and ph.
• The Teacher’s Guide, page 36, introduces two sentences (e.g., ”It hurt when my brother pinched my arm. I yelled, ‘Please don’t do that!’”).
• The sentences for Day 2 incorporate two of the focus elements from the week: “Chinchillas live in the mountains of Chile.  People also keep them as pets.” 
• The sentences for Day 3 include one of the focus elements: “We had to wait for tickets to the theater. Stephanie started whining, “My feet hurt!”
• The sentences for Day 4 read, “The wind whipped through the barn. The scared horse whined loudly.”  
• Each of these lessons, Days 1-5, references pages 5-8 in the Fluency Notebook and the same passages are read daily. There is no practice of ph words, one example of an  sh word, four words each with th and wh, and three words containing ch.
• Instruction is not provided for the teacher on how to teach students to read in context. The materials say to have the students read the page and to have students read to a partner or to pull a group of students together if they need additional help.

Lessons provide students with frequent opportunities to decode words in a sentence based on grade level phonics. Examples include, but are not limited to:

• In the Teacher’s Guide, page 10, students complete the Blending Routine with the sentences, “Steven asked, ‘May I go down the ramp?’ His mother agreed to let him go.”
• In the Teacher’s Guide, page 401, the materials address the prefixes im-, in-, and dis-.  Students complete the Blending Routine with the sentences, "It is impolite to speak while chewing. It happens sometimes, because people are imperfect."

The materials reviewed for Grade 2 partially meet the criteria for materials include systematic instruction of high-frequency words and opportunities to practice reading of high-frequency words to develop automaticity.

The Teacher’s Guide provides a clear scope and sequence chart for the introduction of sight words in the program. Materials also include a Sight Word Routine for introducing the words as part of the Blending Section of each lesson. Words are introduced on Day 1 of each week and practiced for the five days of the week in which they are introduced. Students practice spelling the words during the dictation or Say, Spell, Sort sections of the lesson. Fluency Notebook selections corresponding to the lessons do not provide consistent or systematic contextual practice on the sight words. The materials do not identify which high-frequency list was referenced when developing the scope and sequence for introduction of sight words or what frequency criteria was used. In Grade 2, students are taught three words a week with no review weeks. By the end of Grade 2, students are expected to know 108 words. The program does not introduce the entire list of 200 words from a common list of high-frequency words by the end of Grade 2.  There is some explicit instruction on high-frequency words during the Blending Routine. 

Materials include systematic and explicit instruction of sight-based recognition of irregularly spelled words. Examples include, but are not limited to:

• In the Teacher’s Guide, pages I-21 and I-22, the materials provide a Sight Word Routine with a rationale for teaching and instructions on how to model and teach each word. The guide indicates that these words are introduced during the Blending section of the lesson. 
• In the Teacher’s Guide, pages I-65 and I-66, a scope and sequence chart is provided for the introduction of sight words organized according to the different concepts and instructional weeks in the program.
• Three words are introduced each week for 36 weeks. The high-frequency words are reviewed for Days 1-5 of the week they are introduced. They are also reviewed during the Say, Spell, Sort routine when students have the opportunity to practice spelling the focus words.
• In the Teacher’s Guide, page 15, students learn the high-frequency words: when, ask, may. The teacher reads the words, the students read the words, and then the students orally spell the words. 
• High-frequency words appear sporadically in reading selections in the Fluency Notebook passages, which are incorporated within the lessons. 
• Of the three sight words (because, very, or) introduced in the Teacher’s Guide, Concept 3, Week 1, pages 84-92, only very appears in the reading selections in the Fluency Notebook, Concept 3, pages 13-16, during the week of instruction. The word very appears once across the contextualized reading.

Materials include frequent opportunities for the teacher to model the spelling and reading of high-frequency words in isolation. Students also have opportunities to practice identifying and reading high-frequency words in isolation.

Materials include a limited quantity of new grade-appropriate irregularly spelled words for students to make reading progress. Examples include:

• There are a total of 108 high-frequency words that students will learn by the end of Grade 2. Students learn three sight words a week. 
• The Teacher’s Guide does not indicate which high-frequency list was referenced when deciding which words to introduce.
• The Teacher’s Guide introduces 108 sight words over 36 weeks.
• Approximately 10% of these words are reviewed from Puzzle Piece Phonics, Kindergarten, and Grade 1 materials. 
• The words introduced are often phonetically regular; however, other phonetically irregular high-frequency words are not explicitly taught (e.g., school, thought, around, etc.)
  

The materials reviewed for Grade 2 partially meet the criteria for materials explicitly teach word analysis strategies (e.g., phoneme/grapheme recognition, syllabication, morpheme analysis) based on the requirements of the standards and provide frequent practice opportunities for students to apply word analysis strategies.

The Teacher’s Guide provides explicit instruction in phoneme-grapheme relationships including long vowels spelling with various patterns, digraphs, irregular vowels and r-controlled vowels. The materials introduce students to morphemic analysis skills through the addition of prefixes and suffixes to root words; however, they do not systematically and explicitly teach students to apply these patterns, digraphs, or morphemes to decoding multisyllabic words. Syllabification skills are taught and practiced through limited activities that require a student to count the syllables they hear when a word is pronounced. Students are not taught a systematic approach to using syllabication skills to decode unknown words. Additionally, practice opportunities are not varied across the year.

Materials contain limited explicit instruction of word analysis strategies (e.g. phoneme-grapheme recognition, syllabication, morpheme analysis). Examples include:

• The Teacher’s Guide does not provide a clear sequence for introducing inflectional endings and ordering them from simplest to most difficult.
• In the Teacher’s Guide, pages 84 through 162, students review all long vowels, e.g., the final -e, vowel combinations, long vowels in open syllables. 
• In the Teacher’s Guide, pages 214 through 267, the materials provide instruction on words with inconsistent but common phoneme-grapheme relationships.
• In the Teacher’s Guide, page 281, students are reminded that when they are completing the root word activity Say, Spell, Sort, the root words pass and class have ss on the end and therefore, require, es when writing the plural form. 
• In the Teacher’s Guide, page 341, the teacher says, “I’m going to say an irregular past tense verb. Your job is to break down the word into sounds.” Students are prompted to visualize each sound as they say it. 
• In the Teacher’s Guide, pages 365 through 449, students are taught nine prefixes and six suffixes and the inflectional endings ing and ed.
• In the Teacher’s Guide, page 485, students are prompted to break apart the compound word into the root words. 

Materials contain limited explicit instruction of word solving strategies (graphophonic and syntactic) to decode unfamiliar words. Examples include:

• While the Teacher’s Guide teaches and reviews the component skills of phoneme-grapheme relationships and practices the Blending Routine to guide students in reading short words, it does not provide an explicit strategy for decoding two syllable or multisyllabic words. 
• Other than the teacher modeling some examples of breaking words into syllables, the students are given only occasional practice activities that require them to auditorally identify the number of syllables in the word. 
• The practice activity, Syllable Sort, requires students to pull a word out of their bag and break the words into syllables by clapping the word or holding their hand under their jaw as they say the word.
• Students read the word and then practice counting how many syllables are in it. This helps in encoding the word. 
• Students do not use the skill of applying knowledge of syllables in order to decode unfamiliar multisyllabic words during this particular practice activity.
• When introducing prefixes and suffixes, the Teacher’s Guide does not provide any additional strategies for figuring out the rest of the word, aside from identifying the prefix or suffix.  The Teacher’s Guide, pages 378-379, introduces prefixes in the Blending Routine, but it does not reference the routine spelled out in the beginning of the guide (I-18 & I-19) to be used in combination with prefixes or suffixes.  The set of examples used (qualify, requalify, prequalify) assumes  students can read the first word and then read requalify and prequalify on the basis of knowing the first word; however, if the student does not know the first word, there is no strategy to assist them in figuring it out. 

Limited opportunities are provided over the course of the year for students to learn, practice, and apply word analysis strategies. Examples include:

• In the Blending Routine strategy, the teacher places the syllable marks within multisyllabic words. The students do not have a practice activity that requires them to apply this skill and identify syllables independently.
• When reading words with prefixes and suffixes, students are expected to read the words presented in the lesson after having been shown the puzzle piece with the affix on it and discussing the meaning of it; however, students do not receive explicit instruction in identifying prefixes and suffixes in unknown words and using that knowledge to decode new words. 
• In the Teacher’s Guide, page 15, students complete the Sorting with Separate Picture and Word Cards Routine. The students divide cards into a word stack and a picture stack. Students pick up the picture and tap out the sounds. They find the header for the word and put it there. Then, they say the focused spelling pattern. 
• In the Teacher’s Guide, page 233, students complete the Say, Spell, Sort Routine in which they identify the root words for cloudy and loudly. 
• In the Teacher’s Guide, page 403, students complete the Word Trees Prefixes Routine. Students write the prefix on the bottom of the tree and write the meaning of the prefix on the trunk of the tree. 

Limited opportunities are provided over the course of the year for students to learn, practice, and apply word analysis strategies.  Examples include:

• Students complete the Say, Spell, Sort Routine, the Tree Ladder Routine, and the Separate Picture and Word Card Routine. 
• In the Teacher’s Guide, Concept 6, page 281, students complete the Build Your Schema Routine, in which they work together with a partner to come up with as many nouns as they can that end in ch, sh, x, ss, or zz. Then, they write the plural form in the air . 
• The same activities are used repeatedly over the course of the year for students to practice word analysis skills. There are many word sort activities, but the other word analysis strategies are not varied.
  
  

The materials reviewed for Grade 2 partially meet the criteria for instructional opportunities are built into the materials for systematic, evidence-based, explicit instruction in fluency (Grades 1-2). 

Students read Reader’s Theatre passages to develop fluency. There are limited instructional opportunities built into the materials for explicit fluency instruction that focus on modeling of rate, accuracy, or expression. During the fluency passages that are correlated with the lessons, the teacher is not instructed on how to incorporate or provide any model of intonation, expression, phrasing, punctuation, or rate. No criteria for mastery are indicated and there is no systematic collection of fluency data to indicate whether or not students are successful at mastering the elements of fluency.

Materials include limited opportunities for explicit, systematic instruction in fluency elements using grade-level text. Examples include:

• Read grade-level text orally with accuracy, appropriate rate, and expression on successive readings.
• The Fluency Notebook states on the cover page that “The Reader’s Theater is reading like you’re speaking, reading the words accurately, reading at a natural pace, and reading with expression, and reading like you are the character.”
• The Teacher’s Guide, pages I-31 and 32, describes the basic routine for teaching fluency: Students repeatedly read either a differentiated part in a Reader’s Theater or one of two differentiated informational texts within the Fluency Notebook. Directions for completing the fluency routine are embedded in the daily lesson. 
• In Preparing for Your Week, Teacher’s Guide, Concept 1, page 8, under the section Tips for Fluency, the teacher is instructed to “explain to students that the purpose of doing Reader’s Theater is to practice reading with expression and natural pacing. Model what it looks like to read various punctuation marks and to add emotion.”
• The Teacher’s Guide, page 11, introduces the Fluency Notebook by stating: “A fluent reader reads at a normal pace, says the words accurately, and uses expression. Our Reader’s Theater scripts will come to life when you read them fluently.”  However, it does not model what any of these elements actually look like when reading orally. Teachers are instructed to explain the format of the scripts and facilitate a discussion that leads students to “discover” elements of script, including the cast list and character names. 
• Instructions indicate that: “...the students complete a class read of the Reader’s Theater. You can assign students or groups of students specific parts and/or model various characters yourself." 
• The Teacher’s Guide, pages 260-261, in the Fluency section of the lesson, the directions prompt the teacher to “Review the procedure for Reader’s Theater. Students will work with their small groups all week to practice their lines. Their goal is to read their parts fluently, meaning that they speak at a normal pace and say the lines accurately and with expression. If your schedule allows, tell students that they will present on Day 5.” Students are then assigned to heterogeneous fluency groups and begin reading in the Fluency Notebook. Teachers are instructed to circulate and support groups as necessary until time is up or the majority of groups are at a stopping point. 
• In the Teacher’s Guide, page 278, the Fluency Section has the teacher assign students to either Group 1 or 2 based on similar reading ability. Using the Learner’s Notebook (Group 1, Week 1, Concept 6, page 221 or Group 2, page 223), students are instructed to read the first part of the assigned group passage with their partner. They are to keep reading until the teacher says stop. If they finish the part before the teacher says stop, they are to begin rereading the passage and continue until the end of the time period (5-7 minutes). The teacher is instructed to circulate and support small groups or partners as needed.

Materials provide limited opportunities for students to hear fluent reading of grade-level text by a model reader. Examples include:

• In the Teacher’s Guide, page 57, Tips for Fluency state, “Students will read ‘How the Hen Tricked the Fox’ in the Fluency Notebook.” The parts of Blossom and the Fox, are on grade level and the parts of Narrator 1 and 2 are above grade level. 
• In the Teacher’s Guide, page 64, students present their plays to the class, if time allows. 

Materials include limited resources for explicit instruction in fluency. Examples include:

• Both the Learner’s Notebook and the Fluency Notebook provide passages for reading that are correlated to the daily lessons. Repeated readings of texts in the Learner’s Notebook take place over the course of four days. However, no data is collected to indicate either accuracy or fluency.  
• When students read the scripts provided in the Fluency Notebook, there is no fluency or accuracy goal or criteria set to measure their performance. No repeated measures are taken to indicate student progress in the acquisition of these important elements of fluency.
• The section Fluency: Reading Like You’re Speaking does not provide explicit instruction on how to read fluently. Teachers are provided with the instruction to “circulate and listen to students read or gather a small group of students who need additional support.”
  

The materials reviewed for Grade 2 partially meet the criteria for varied and frequent opportunities are built into the materials for students to engage in supported practice to gain oral reading fluency beginning in mid-Grade 1 and through Grade 2 (once accuracy is secure).

There are frequent opportunities built into the materials for students to engage in supported practice to gain oral fluency. In the Teacher’s Guide, there are two sources for contextual reading materials, the Learner’s Notebook and the Fluency Notebook. While the Teacher’s Guide provides oral reading texts for students to engage with, students are expected to reread the assigned poems three times in one day and then repeat the same readings for the following three days. This provides frequent practice, but it is not varied. Materials lack guidance and feedback suggestions to the teacher for supporting students’ gains in oral reading fluency.

Limited opportunities are provided over the course of the year in core materials for students to gain oral reading fluency. Examples include:

• In the Teacher’s Guide, page 20, students read the Reader’s Theatre passage, “What Makes a Good Friend.”
• In the Teacher’s Guide, page 128, students read the fluency passage either on grade level, “Bees as Pollinators,” or above Grade level, “Butterflies as Pollinators.” 
• In the Learner’s Notebook students read passages each Friday. 
• Passages in the Learner’s Notebook are read on Fridays each week and used for comprehension checks. The stated purpose of these texts (Teacher’s Guide, page I-33) is for students to “independently consider the Reader’s Theaters (in the Fluency Notebook) and informational texts as a whole …. to deepen their understanding of the weekly texts by working independently to answer higher-level questions.” 
• The Teacher's Guide states that “fluency and comprehension checks encourage students to read for meaning and allow teachers to assess student application of phonics and word study concepts…”, but the guide does not provide explicit instructions for how to accomplish that or any criterion for measuring progress. These passages are read individually by students during independent practice activities. 
• Each day of instruction, students read a Reader’s Theatre text and then present it on Day 5. On page 368, Concept 7, Week 1, students read the grade-level text, “Debate It.”
• The Fluency Notebook contains selections that are repeated daily on Days 1-4 of each concept week and read orally. All selections provided are scripts and students are assigned parts to read. The scripts may be read as a whole group or in small groups. There are no instructions provided to the teacher other than “Circulate and listen to students read or gather a small group of students who need additional support.”
• These selections do not vary. Students read the same texts on Days 1-4 of each concept week.
• No correction or modeling procedures are provided. Students are assigned parts in the script and are told to read the scripts out loud with no specific feedback being given regarding their phrasing, expression, rate or accuracy. 
• While text reading is done daily, it is not varied in terms of:
• the words used in context, 
• the type of materials read. They are all scripts, no narrative passages with or without dialogue, poems, or speeches. 
• how they are practiced (i.e., whisper reading, choral reading, small group, whole group, etc.)

Materials contain opportunities for students to participate in repeated readings of a grade-level text to practice oral reading fluency. Examples include, but are not limited to:

• In theTeacher’s Guide, page 23, during the fluency passage, students are told that they are going to read informational text. The materials state that students will read the text over and over so that they build fluency and learn as much as possible from each one. 
• In the Teacher’s Guide, page 173, students read the Reader’s Theatre script, “Superstart and Bummer.” The narrator parts are above grade level. This is the second time the students read through the passages.
• Repeated readings of the scripts occur daily, and they are repeated for four days during the concept week. 

Materials include limited guidance and feedback suggestions to the teacher for supporting students’ gains in oral reading fluency. Examples include:

• In the Teacher’s Guide, page 232, the teacher circulates during the time the students are reading the Reader’s Theatre passage for that day and supports groups as necessary until time is up or the majority of groups are at a stopping point. 
• Throughout each of these readings, no specific feedback is provided to students regarding their accuracy, fluency, expression, or phrasing, and there is no criterion set for how to measure whether students are improving in any of these elements across the repeated readings. There are no instructions to the teacher in how or when to provide feedback or what kind of feedback is needed in order to ensure students develop fluency.