Let's start talking about phonics!

As a first grade teacher, I understand the stress of putting all of the pieces together to create a balanced literacy program. The phonics piece is definitely an important one. In my experience, I have found it difficult to manage all of the pieces of phonics lessons. First, I had to use many different sources for each lesson. Second, I had to spend a great deal of time cutting, pasting, copying, etc. Third, it always felt...haphazard...isolated skills that may not always apply to what children were reading. It seemed I was spending way too much time preparing for this piece of the literacy block...

The games were cute. The centers were cute. But was what I was doing purposeful to teach readers to decode? Honestly...I wasn't sure. We also did not have effective data tracking methods for phonics skills and strategies. Sure, we could do running records to see who could read what, but how did we target those deficiencies? We could use book levels to help determine skills and strategies needed to read at that level. It just didn't seem effective enough.

We came up with a working solution. We refers to myself and two wonderful teachers: Meghan Chase and Kristin Lopa. Together, we took what I had created and blended it into a systematic explicit system for teaching phonics. Not only are we able to teach phonics in a workshop model in only ten minutes per lesson, but we are able to collect and use data to target strengths and weaknesses for instruction.

I had been creating phonics pieces for more than 8 years. The pieces were helpful, but again, it seemed a little much like haphazard 'word families' and not skill and strategy instruction. That's when the research began. We used our collective experience as first grade teachers and combined it with current research and methodologies. We started to focus more on the blending of sounds to recode and decode words. We also followed NRP research that stated that children learn to read more efficiently and effectively when the instruction is systematic and explicit. "The summary of these studies, led to a definite conclusion that systematic phonics instruction gave children a faster start in learning to read than responsive instruction...or no phonics instruction. Phonics instruction improved Kindergarten and First Grade children's word recognition and spelling skills and had a positive impact on their reading comprehension" (The National Reading Panel Report: Practical Advice for Teachers, pg. 12)