The Reading Horizons Discovery materials meet the expectations for alignment to research-based practices and standards for foundational skills instruction as well as usability.

The materials include explicit instruction in the practice of letter names, sounds, and formation. The materials contain a clear, evidence-based explanation for the expected sequence for teaching phonemic awareness skills. The materials include a phonemic awareness warm-up as Part 1 for 5 minutes, including phonemic awareness tasks such as isolating, blending, and segmenting. During Part 2, materials introduce the new sound(s) using a Sound Wall and then immediately introduce the grapheme using the Consonant Corner portion of the Sound Wall. The Corrective Feedback and Next Steps guide provides teacher guidance for corrective feedback when needed for students. The materials include specific directions to the teacher for demonstrating how to articulate and pronounce each phoneme.

The materials do not contain elements of instruction that are based on the three-cueing system. The materials include a detailed scope and sequence with an evidence-based rationale for the sequence of phonics instruction. Instructional timing is included in each daily lesson and includes 40 minutes of instruction: Part 1: Phonemic Awareness, 5 minutes, Part 2: Phonics and Spelling, 27 minutes, Part 3: Whole Class Transfer: 8 minutes. The materials include systematic and explicit phonics instruction with repeated routines for teacher modeling. The materials include decodable texts containing grade-level phonics skills aligned to the program’s scope and sequence.

The materials include systematic and explicit instruction in high-frequency words. The instruction includes identification of decodable, not yet decodable, and irregularly spelled words, as well as a routine for identifying the irregular spelling or not yet taught sound-spelling. The materials include regular explicit instruction in word analysis.

The materials include limited opportunities for explicit instruction in oral reading fluency within the context of decodable passages and readers with only general information about habits of fluent readers included.

The materials include regular and systematic assessment opportunities in all foundational skills. Varied assessments include Readiness Checks at the start of the year, Daily Skill Checks after each lesson, Student Observation Checks, Multi-Skill Checks offered three times for each skill set, a Mid-Year Cumulative Skill Check, and an End-of-Year Cumulative Skill Check.

The materials include teacher guidance with ancillary materials and annotations that support teachers in program implementation. The scope of the program can be reasonably completed within a regular school year with 120 core lessons and 16 review lessons.

The materials include strategies and support for students who read, write, and/or speak in a language other than English in the Multilingual Learners Guide. The materials include ample strategies and supports for students in special populations. The decodable texts, Teacher Phoneme Cards, and the Individual Student Sound Walls included in the materials provide a balance of images of people representing various demographic and physical characteristics. The materials provide some guidance to encourage teachers to draw upon student home language to facilitate learning, including a contrastive analysis document establishing cognates in more than one language (e.g., Spanish, French, Mandarin, German). The materials do not include a contrastive analysis document describing morphemes based on multiple languages. However, the materials include a Linguistic Variations chart explaining specific linguistic variations in different consonants, vowels, digraphs, blends, glued sounds, trigraphs, vowel teams, and special vowel sounds. The materials provide some support for speakers of English language varieties by providing a few Teacher Tips that highlight regional variations in the pronunciation of certain phonemes.