Unit 1 has three main purposes. 

1.  Increase students' awareness of environmental noises and words within sentences.

2. Teach students how to draw a number of writing strokes used to create letters (e.g., horizontal lines, vertical lines, circles, etc.)

3. Teach students the meanings of various position words (e.g., right, left, top, bottom, etc.) 

This will help students prepare to pay attention to sounds within words or the ability to hear sounds (i.e., phonemes), which is crucial for writing. Practicing writing strokes will also increase students' fine motor skills and help them begin to master the tripod grip, which will prepare students to write letters in Unit 3. Learning the various position words will also help students with reading directionality.  

Units 1 and 2 are in many ways the most important units of the Kindergarten Skills Strand. These units lay the foundation for students’ future reading and writing. In Unit 1, students learned that speech is made up of words, and they practiced distinguishing and counting environmental sounds. In Unit 2, students will learn how to blend “chunks” of speech sounds. They will learn to blend segmented syllables to say two-syllable words, as well as how to blend individual sounds known as phonemes to say two- and three-sound words. Blending is a critical skill for reading. In fact, it is the single most important skill for reading. Working with sounds (or phonemes) is also extremely important because our writing system is a system for transcribing sounds into print. If students can learn to hear individual sounds and blend those sounds to make words, they will be well prepared to use the letter-sound correspondences they will study in Unit 3 and beyond as the basis for decoding. 

In Unit 3, students will begin to make connections between sounds and symbols. They will continue to practice blending sounds into words, and they will be taught several of the symbols used when reading and writing. Specifically, they will learn the most common way to spell eight of the sounds of English: 

• /m/ spelled ‘m’ as in mat (/m/ > ‘m’)

• /a/ spelled ‘a’ as in mad (/a/ > ‘a’)

• /t/ spelled ‘t’ as in tag (/t/ > ‘t’)

• /d/ spelled ‘d’ as in dad (/d/ > ‘d’)

• /o/ spelled ‘o’ as in mom (/o/ > ‘o’)

• /k/ spelled ‘c’ as in cat (/k/ > ‘c’)

• /g/ spelled ‘g’ as in dog (/g/ > ‘g’)

• /i/ spelled ‘i’ as in dig (/i/ > ‘i’)

There are 15 lessons in this unit that are designed to teach a number of skills. The lessons are followed by the Pausing Point, which provides recommendations for practicing the skills. In this unit, eight sounds are introduced, along with the most common way of spelling each sound.

The eight sounds and corresponding spellings are:

1. /n/ spelled ‘n’ as in man

2. /h/ spelled ‘h’ as in hat

3. /s/ spelled ‘s’ as in sit

4. /f/ spelled ‘f’ as in fan

5. /v/ spelled ‘v’ as in van

6. /z/ spelled ‘z’ as in zigzag

7. /p/ spelled ‘p’ as in pig

8. /e/ spelled ‘e’ as in pen

In this unit eight more sounds are introduced using the most common spelling for each sound. In addition, a spelling alternative for the /k/ sound is introduced. The nine sounds and corresponding spellings are:

1. /b/ spelled ‘b’ as in bed

2. /l/ spelled ‘l’ as in log

3. /r/ spelled ‘r’ as in rat

4. /u/ spelled ‘u’ as in mug

5. /w/ spelled ‘w’ as in wig

6. /j/ spelled ‘j’ as in jam

7. /y/ spelled ‘y’ as in yes

8. /x/ spelled ‘x’ as in box (a sound combination)

9. /k/ spelled ‘k’ as in kid (as an alternative to ‘c’)

This unit differs from Units 3–5 in several ways. In each of the three previous units, you introduced eight or nine letter-sound correspondences. In this unit, you will introduce only one new letter-sound correspondence, the ‘s’ spelling for the /z/ sound. Students have already learned the spelling ‘z’ for the /z/ sound. In this unit, they will learn that the spelling ‘s’ is a spelling alternative for /z/. One goal for this unit is to encourage students to automatize the letter-sound correspondences and blending procedures they learned in Units 3–5.

There are three additional new elements in this unit:

1. consonant clusters

2. letter names

3. reading text independently

In this unit, six more consonant sounds and the most common spelling for each sound are introduced:

• /ch/ spelled ‘ch’ as in chin

• /sh/ spelled ‘sh’ as in shop

• /th/ (unvoiced) spelled ‘th’ as in thin

• /th/ (voiced) spelled ‘th’ as in them

• /qu/ spelled ‘qu’ as in quit

• /ng/ spelled ‘ng’ as in sing

The six sounds presented in Unit 7 differ from the sounds studied up to this point because all six are generally written with two letters instead of one. English has more than forty sounds and only twenty-six letters. The people who began transcribing English long ago solved this imbalance by using multi-letter combinations to represent some sounds.

In this unit, you will introduce fourteen new double-letter spellings for consonant sounds and four new high-frequency Tricky Words. 

These are the double-letter spellings in this unit:

• ‘mm’ for /m/ as in drumming

• '‘nn’ for /n/ as in running

• ‘pp’ for /p/ as in puppets

• ‘bb’ for /b/ as in rabbit

• ‘tt’ for /t/ as in mitt

• ‘dd’ for /d/ as in sledding

• ‘cc’ and ‘ck’ for /k/ as in hiccup and clock

• ‘gg’ for /g/ as in egg

• ‘ff’ for /f/ as in muffin

• ‘ss’ for /s/ as in dress

• ‘zz’ for /z/ as in jazz

• ‘ll’ for /l/ as in shell

• ‘rr’ for /r/ as in ferret

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These double-letter spellings most frequently occur after a short-vowel sound.

This unit does not introduce any new letter-sound correspondences. However, it does introduce the uppercase letters having a different shape than the lowercase letters as well as fifteen additional Tricky Words. It also introduces Story Questions Activity Pages, which contain questions on the stories in the Reader. 

In this unit you will introduce five additional vowel sounds and the most common spelling for each sound:

1. /ee/ spelled ‘ee’ as in tree

2. /ae/ spelled ‘a_e’ as in plane

3. /ie/ spelled ‘i_e’ as in limes

4. /oe/ spelled ‘o_e’ as in cone

5. /ue/ spelled ‘u_e’ as in cube

You will also teach eleven additional Tricky Words, most of which contain one of the sounds taught in this unit. However, these words have the sound written with a different spelling.

NOTE: We will not teach the entirety of this unit. Content covered in this unit will be taught and reviewed in 1st grade.