During these first few weeks of our Fundations program, I will be teaching and reviewing:

• Letter recognition a-z

• Letter formation from a-z lowercase letters

• Sound recognition (consonants and vowel sounds)

• Print Awareness

• Word Awareness

• Story re-telling and comprehension

• Rhyming

• Phonemic awareness skills to identify the beginning and ending sounds in words

Unit 1

Week 1 - t b f

Week 2 - n m

Week 3 - i u

Week 4 - c o

Week 5 - a g

Week 6 - d s

Week 7 - e r

Week 8 - p j

Week 9 - l h k

Week 10 - v w

Week 11 - y x

Week 12 - z q

Please encourage proper pencil grip when practicing their writing and letter formation at home.

The video link below is a video I created for students to use at home for proper letter formation and the letter sounds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WW9hHHEA8g

Please be aware of what our "writing grid" is. See poster as a reference to sky line letters, plane line letters, plane line round letters, and plane line slide letters.

Unit 2

During these next several weeks, I will be teaching or reviewing:

• letter formation for capital letters

• letter sequence from A-Z

• story prediction

• reading short vowel words (three sounds/CVC words)

• within this unit, words will begin with f l m n r s, the middle sound will be short vowels, and words will end with d, g, p, t: mat, nap, sit

Week 1 - alphabetical order

Week 2 - A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H

Week 3 - I, J, K, L, M, N,O, P

Week 4 - Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z

Unit 3

We are ready to move forward with:

• distinguishing long and short vowel sounds

• use phonemic awareness skills to identify the beginning and ending sounds in words

• blend three sounds into words

• segment and spell 3-sound short vowel words (CVC words)

• beginning letters will be f l m n r s, and end with the letters d g p t. The middle sound will be short vowel sounds. At this point your child should be reading "chunks" or phrases along with many sight words.

Unit 4

Your child will continue to practice:

Your child will also learn how to read and spell consonant digraphs. A consonant digraph is two consonants together that made one sound such as "s" and "h" together they make the sounds /sh/. Your child will learn the following consonant digraphs:

• wh - whistle - /w/

• th - thumb - /th/

• ch - chin - /ch/

• ck - sock - /k/

• sh - ship - /sh/

I will also continue to emphasize the fluent reading of sentences, using phrasing. when your child reads please be sure if sounds more like talking rather than reading one word at a time.

WHY SHOULD WE ALSO INCORPORATE PHONEMIC AWARENESS?

Phonemic awareness:

Understanding that spoken words are made up of individual sounds called phonemes. A child that is phonemically aware can isolate these sounds, blend the sounds, segment a word into individual sounds, and they can manipulate these sounds for substituting and deleting sound activities. Phonemic Awareness is both oral and auditory. The words will never be shown in print they will just be spoken aloud. Phonics and Phonemic Awareness are completely different, but they are both essential to build literacy skills. Without Phonemic Awareness, they will lack the decoding skills they need to read and break down words in text, and encode words when they being to write.

Implementing Phonemic Awareness into our daily lessons during our literacy block, provides students with explicit instruction in sounds.

8-10 skills each day.

8 essential Phonemic Awareness skills – fast paced and fun activities:

· Rhyming

· Onset fluency – isolating the initial sound they hear in a word

· Blending sounds to make words – compound words and syllables until they start to blend individual phonemes into words

· Medial and final sound activities

· Segment words

· Substituting/ adding or deleting sounds

· Letter naming is included and the only time print will be in front of students so they can correlate the letter with the sound it makes

· Language awareness – nursery rhymes and repeating sentences counting number of words