UFLI Foundations strikes the perfect balance between structure and responsiveness to students’ needs. The program features ample opportunities for students to practice, along with built-in gradual release. It provides teachers with detailed lesson plans, a PowerPoint slide deck to accompany each lesson, and downloadable materials for homework or center activities.
UFLI Foundations is an example of an educative curriculum. This means that simply using the materials and lesson structure will add to your professional knowledge and skills in key areas:
The process of reading acquisition
Key linguistic elements necessary for reading
Evidence-based instructional methods that promote reading proficiency
Another key component that sets UFLI Foundations apart is the professional development available to prepare teachers to implement the lessons. You may choose to take advantage of webinars, videos of lesson components being taught, and other online resources that will help you make the most of UFLI Foundations.
UFLI Foundations provides teachers with detailed but easy to follow lesson plans that all follow this eight-step routine:
Phonemic Awareness
Visual Drill
Auditory Drill
Blending Drill
New Concept
Word Work
Irregular Words
Connected Text
Steps 1 through 4 serve as a warm-up and review of previously taught concepts. Step 5 is an explicit introduction to a new concept including guided practice reading and spelling words. Steps 6 through 8 are opportunities to apply concepts through reading and writing activities at the word and text level.
UFLI Foundations targets the following foundational reading skills:
Phoneme blending and segmentation practice
Accuracy and automaticity of grapheme-phoneme correspondences
Decoding automaticity of words with previously learned concepts
Explicit introduction of new concepts
Decoding and encoding practice
Reading and spelling irregular words
Reading and spelling connected text