These curricula are suited for kindergarten and primary classrooms. The original version (yellow book), which is typically used in first and second grade classrooms, can easily be adapted for a kindergarten classroom by simply doing half of each lesson per day. As a result you will spend two weeks on each lesson, and you will cover through week 17.

The kindergarten version of these lessons (blue book) spends more time on each skill. The kindergarten curriculum covers all consonants, short vowels, digraphs, blends, and rime patterns. By comparison, the yellow book also goes into long vowels, R-controlled, special vowel sounds, and multisyllabic words.

Each curriculum is intended to be completed with a whole class group. I have completed these lessons with as many as 32 first graders in a class. These lessons should only take between 12 and 15 minutes a day. Pacing is very important. It should be quickly paced and free of interruptions. I typically begin my day with Phonemic Awareness as it is a fun-filled lesson time with students’ experiencing feelings of success and, therefore, enjoyable for all of the students and myself.

It has been my experience that students who are struggling can benefit from multiple, repeated exposures to these lessons. In my practice, we often repeat daily lessons when students are seen by specialists in small group or one-on-one settings. In full day Kindergarten classes, I suggest repeating the lesson once in the morning and once again in the afternoon. There is sufficient research which supports the premise that all students at all ages, regardless of abilities, can benefit from explicit instruction in phonemic awareness (See Shaywitz, 1999).

This should be a fun-filled time. If done correctly, students can learn to love our challenging English language and have greater success and navigating the unpredictable, complex alphabetic structure of language and print! ENJOY!

Notes:

1. There is some debate with words that start with blends, whether the whole blend is the onset or the first letter (ex. skate /sk/ or /s/). I always allowed both but encouraged my students to isolate to the smallest phoneme possible.
2. Syllabication and pronunciation are in many cases dialectically controlled. I consulted many dictionaries in writing these lesson plans and often discovered conflicting results. In any case, if you disagree with any of my syllables or diacritical markings, please feel free to change them to your preference and/or reasoning.
3. When doing the letter naming portion of this book, I suggest that you teach all the sounds that a letter might make as we cannot know for certain which sound a letter will make in a word. So when teaching the vowels, I would teach “Name is A, Sound is /?/ or /?/” and for consonants with multiple sounds, “Name is C, Sound is /k/ or /s/.”