The alphabetic principle involves an understanding that written letters represent spoken sounds and that letter sounds can be blended together to read words and segmented to spell words.  The phonics continuum progression of skills includes:

• Letter Sounds

• Short Vowel Words (CVC)

• Short Vowel Words (CCVC & CVCC)

• Long Vowel Words (CVCe)

• Long Vowel Words (VT)

• Variant Vowel and R-Controlled Words (VV & R-Con)

Phonics skills are typically taught from Kindergarten through Third Grade.  Students with a lack of skills in this area cannot:

• Understand that words are composed of letters.

• Associate an alphabetic character (i.e., letter) with its corresponding phoneme or sound.

• Identify a word based on a sequence of letter-sound correspondences (e.g., that "mat" is made up of three letter-sound correspondences /m/ /a/ /t/).

• Blend letter-sound correspondences to identify decodable words.

• Use knowledge of letter-sound correspondences to identify words in which letters represent their most common sound.

• Identify and manipulate letter-sound correspondences within words.

• Read pseudowords (e.g., "tup", with reasonable speed).

https://presscommunity.org

https://mimtsstac.org/

Progress Monitoring