Strategies, Practices and Tools
Decades of research provides a clear understanding of how skilled reading develops and how to most effectively support children in learning to read proficiently. Evidence-based, structured literacy instruction develops all the foundational language and literacy skills that must be woven together so that children can make meaning from the words they read.
The information presented here is intended to complement evidence-based core reading curricula and intervention programs already in place and help educators fill in gaps or modify their approaches with effective strategies, instructional practices, and tools and activities to implement them.
Early childhood educators can focus their practices to help children build language and emergent literacy skills. Pre-K and K-3 educators can find evidence-based ways to provide explicit, implicit, and incidental instruction across the essential components of literacy. And English Language Arts teachers across grades 4-12 will find effective practices to help students meet the increasing need for skilled reading.
Instructional Strategy
Support students to understand how letters and groups of letters link to sounds to form letter-sound relationships and spelling patterns.
Phonics supports decoding and spelling and leads to fluent reading (accurate and automatic).
Effective Practices
- Practice reading decodable words in isolation and in decodable text (to practice the phonics skills taught).
- Integrate encoding with decoding.
- Teach letter-sound correspondences.
- Teach common spelling patterns.
- Teach students to read multisyllabic words.
- Teach students to read irregularly spelled words.
- Teach students for a minimum of 30 minutes each day.
- Kindergarten
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- Once students understand the alphabetic principle (at least by the middle of kindergarten), teach early letter/sound correspondences and use that knowledge to decode simple words.
- Teach students phonics using the following scope and sequence:
- Consistent Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences
- Predictable consonants
- Predictable short vowels
- Long vowels associated with single letters
- Consonant digraphs
- Variable, More Challenging Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences
- Irregular spellings of high-frequency words
- Consistent Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences
- Grade 1
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- Teach students phonics using the following scope and sequence:
- Consistent Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences
- Consonant digraphs
- Two-consonant blends
- Variable, More Challenging Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences
- Single consonant/s/ = c and s; /z/ = s and z; /k/ = k, c; -ck after a short vowel; /j/ = j, g
- Hard and soft c and g
- Final consonant blends and nasals: nt, nd, mp, nk
- VCe long vowel pattern in single-syllable words
- Vowel teams for long vowel sounds, most common: ee, ea, ai, ay, oa, ow, oe, igh
- Vowel- r combinations, single syllable: er, ar, or, ir, ur
- Dipthongs and vowels /aw/ and /oo/: oi, oy, ou, ow, au, aw, oo, u
- All jobs of y (as consonant /y/; as long /i/ on ends of one-syllable words like cry; as long /e/ on ends of multi-syllabic words like baby; as short /i/ in a few words like gym, myth)
- Irregular spellings of high-frequency words
- Six Syllable Types and Oddities in Multisyllabic Words
- Closed: short vowel ending with consonant
- Open: long vowel, no consonant ending
- Orthographic Rules and Generalizations
- No words ends in v or j
- Floss rule (f, l, s, z doubling)
- Consonant doubling rule for suffix addition
- Drop silent e for suffix addition
- Change y to i for suffix addition
- Other Aspects of Orthography
- Contractions with am, is, has, not
- Possessives and plurals
- Basic Morphology (Anglo-Sazon and Latin)
- Compounds
- Inflectional suffixes: inflectional suffix on single-syllable base words with no spelling change
- Inflectional suffixes: inflectional suffix on single-syllable base words with spelling change
- Irregular past tense and plurals
- Common prefixes
- Consistent Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences
- Teach students phonics using the following scope and sequence:
- Grade 2
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- Teach students phonics using the following scope and sequence:
- Consistent Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences
- Three consonant blends with digraphs: squ, str, scr, thr, shr
- Variable, More Challenging Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences
- Diagraphs ph(/f/), gh(/f/), ch (/k/ and /sh/)
- Trigraphs
- Other Vowel-r combinations: are, air, our, ore, ear, eer, ure, etc.
- Trigraphs -tch (/ch/), -dge (/j/)
- Dipthongs and vowels /aw/ and /oo/: oi, oy, ou, ow, au, aw, oo, u
- Silent letter combinat-ions, Anglo-Saxon words
- The –ild, -ost, -olt, -ind pattern
- Irregular spellings of high-frequency words
- Six Syllable Types and Oddities in Multisyllabic Words
- Vowel-consonant-e (VCe), long vowel sound
- Vowel r-combinations
- Vowel teams: long, short, and dipthong vowels
- Consonant-le (Cle), final syllables
- Multisyllabic word construction and division principles: VC/CV, V/CV. VC/v. CV/VC
- Oddities and Schwa
- Other Aspects of Orthography
- Homophone
- Possessives and Plurals
- Basic Morphology
- Inflectional suffixes: inflectional suffix on single-syllable base words with spelling change
- Irregular past tense and plurals
- Less common prefixes (fore-, pro-, intra-, etc.)
- Common derivational suffixes
- Consistent Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences
- Teach students phonics using the following scope and sequence:
- Grade 3
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- Teach students phonics using the following scope and sequence:
- Variable, More Challenging Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences
- Irregular spellings of high-frequency words
- Six Syllable Types and Oddities in Multisyllabic Words
- Multisyllabic word construction and division principles: VC/CV, V/CV. VC/v. CV/VC
- Other Aspects of Orthography
- Possessives and Plurals
- Basic Morphology
- Irregular past tense and plurals
- Common derivational suffixes
- Common Latin roots
- Variable, More Challenging Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences
- Teach students phonics using the following scope and sequence:
Tools and Activities
Phonics: Decode and Write Words with the "Silent e"
Sample instructional routine for explicit instruction.
Download from Florida Center for Reading Research
Decoding and Spelling Lesson
Instructional plan to help students accurately read and spell words based on syllable patterns.
Download from Tennessee Center for the Study and Treatment of Dyslexia
Foundational Skills Activities
Find several example activities for teaching foundational skills to support reading for understanding, including blending, chunking, sounding out, word analysis, and more.
Learn More from What Works Clearinghouse
Related
Developmental benchmarks and literacy behaviors that most children display at a particular age/grade.
Evidence-based reading interventions support students who are identified as struggling with specific foundational literacy skills.
Evidence-based core curricula, interventions, and supplemental programs play a critical role in supporting students’ reading success.
While seemingly effortless, good reading is made up of a set of complex skills and strategies.