1st Grade Report Overview

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

The materials include a scope and sequence for phonemic awareness instruction. Phonemic awareness activities often align with phonics skills. The materials include systematic and explicit instruction in phonemic awareness skills with repeated teacher modeling. The materials also include teacher guidance on corrective feedback through Positive Error Correction teacher tips and additional guidance in the margins or at the end of lessons. The materials include Articulation Videos and Guidewords, Movement, and Proper Articulation of Sounds document, which includes examples for instruction in phoneme articulation. 

The materials do not contain elements of instruction that are based on the three-cueing system for teaching decoding. The materials provide a clear, evidence-based explanation for the phonics scope and sequence order, which is intentionally ordered from simpler to more complex skills. Phonics instruction is based on high utility patterns and common phonics generalizations. The materials provide appropriate pacing of phonics skills, which are taught daily in 20-30 minute teacher-led whole group lessons, 20-30 minutes daily in small group lessons, and 30-40 minutes of independent practice time each week in Units 6-28. Students practice phonics skills in isolation, phrases, sentences, and decodables. Lesson 5 of any given week reviews phonics skills introduced and practiced during Lessons 1-4. The materials include systematic and explicit instruction in phonics with repeated teacher modeling. The appendix provides guidance to teachers on providing corrective feedback to students. The materials contain spelling rules and generalizations aligned to the phonics scope and sequence, and these generalizations are taught in conjunction with reading words that follow these rules. The materials contain decodable texts with phonics aligned to the phonics scope and sequence. 

The materials provide systematic and explicit instruction of Heart Words (high-frequency words) with consistent, explicit instructional routines repeated each week for Units 3-24. The materials provide opportunities for students to read high-frequency words in isolation through the Heart Word Magic Videos and practice activities, including Look, Think, Say!, Pop-Up, 3-Up, and Read a Row. The students have a template to write Heart Words and to mark the irregularly spelled part of the word. The units contain dictation sentences that include Heart Words. The materials provide frequent explicit instruction of syllable types and include routines for syllable division that promote the decoding and encoding of words. Instruction is provided in morpheme analysis. 

The materials include systematic instruction in oral reading fluency. The instructional routine includes the teacher modeling fluent reading, discussing how to address punctuation when reading, and strategies to address accuracy. The materials include varied opportunities throughout the program over the course of the year for students to work on reading with automaticity and prosody. Practice opportunities for oral reading fluency are provided through decodable passages, phrases, and sentences found in student workbooks. Guidance for Positive Corrective Feedback is provided within mini-lesson resources and in the appendices. The materials include systematic assessment opportunities through reading the passages and tracking accuracy. The materials contain multiple assessment opportunities with cold 1-minute reads of decodable texts corresponding to each unit, which includes a consistent routine that tracks students’ accuracy.