Word Work

We use the Fundations program for Word Work.

The main components of this program are:


Phonological Awareness

  • This includes phoneme (sound) awareness, syllable awareness, and word awareness.

Sound Mastery

  • Students learn a keyword for each sound such as a-apple-/a/.

  • Sounds are taught in two directions - letter to sound and sound to letter.

Phonics

  • Students read and spell short vowel words and vowel-consonant-e words in one and two syllable words.

  • They learn a finger-tapping method to blend sounds in words.

  • Students apply phonics skills to decode words, phrases, and sentences that contain the letter/sound relationships they are studying.

Sight Word Instruction

  • Sight words or "Trick Words" are commonly used, phonetically irregular words which need to be memorized (ex: "the" "was").

Fluency

  • Students work on automaticity, which is the quick and automatic recognition of words in isolation.

  • Students also work on prosody, which is phrasing and expression.

Spelling

  • Students learn to segment and spell trick words in correspondence to decoding patterns.

  • They also learn to spell "trick words" through memorization.