Specifications include, but are not limited to: 3.1 Word Recognition and Spelling ● Pre-assessments to place students in a level of instruction ● Systematic Scope and Sequence for Phonemic Awareness and Orthography Concepts ● Daily and weekly routines are clearly outlined ● Progress monitoring is embedded into instruction ● Phonemic Awareness instruction and practice includes all 44 phonemes ● Intensive Phonological Awareness instruction that includes isolation, blending, segmenting and manipulation tasks that begin with large sound units and progresses to individual phonemes ● Articulatory models and descriptors included ● Phonemic Awareness instruction continues with graphemes once graphemes are mastered ● Instruction of letters includes explicit instruction of handwriting ● Spelling is addressed in tandem with phoneme/grapheme mapping and decoding ● Instruction of letters is supported with embedded mnemonics ● Irregular or Temporarily Irregular High Frequency Words are taught through decoding with the unexpected grapheme(s) ● Daily practice reading words in isolation and connected, decodable text ● Decodable text is aligned with phonics concepts and Irregular High Frequency Words taught ● Daily dictation practice ● Syllable instruction ● Instruction in multisyllabic words includes strategies for flexing the vowel sounds (set for variability) ● Morphology instruction beginning with the 8 inflectional suffixes and most common prefixes is taught along with Kindergarten concepts ● Repeated exposure to words in isolation and in connected text to support orthographic mapping/sight word recognition ● Supports and scaffolds for Multilingual Learners ● Student materials are engaging and purposeful ● Teacher materials are supportive and user-friendly, and include suggestions for adaptations for students with hearing and vision impairments, including how to address phonics instruction with students who are blind or deaf. ● Pacing guides are rigorous but flexible to adjust to needs of different learners ● Assessments measure phonemic awareness, reading words in isolation, reading decodable connected text and spelling ● Assessments measure both accuracy and automaticity ● Professional development is available and high quality 3.2 Fluency ● Pre-assessments to place students in a level of instruction ● Specially designed practice opportunities in varied levels of decodable text that improve accuracy, reading rate and prosody ● Explicit instruction in attention to punctuation ● Explicit instruction in phrasing ● Explicit instruction in reading with expression ● Student materials are engaging and purposeful ● Teacher materials are supportive and user-friendly ● Assessment tools to measure progress in accuracy, reading rate and prosody ● Professional Development is available and high quality
