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Lesson Structure
Lesson Structure
Phonics Blitz lessons have four parts: oral reading, phonemic awareness, phonics, and reading words and sentences. The lessons include all of the National Reading Panel’s five essential components of reading instruction. The primary focus is on improving phonics skills, translating into improved accuracy and fluency. The Phonics Blitz scope and sequence is systematic and cumulative.
Oral Reading – Each lesson begins with a timed oral reading and reviewing vocabulary from the passage. Phonics Blitz materials include a set of 40 mostly expository passages. In the first 20 lessons, students focus on reading accurately and fluently. In lessons 21-40, students preview the passage and answer questions to develop their comprehension skills before, during, and after reading the passage. Students chart their own accuracy rates (percentage of words read correctly) and fluency scores (words correct per minute). By hearing the students read aloud and reviewing their charts, the teacher can monitor how well instruction is transferring to text that students would read in their academic courses.
Phonemic Awareness – Phonemic awareness is taught and developed in the first 20 lessons. In this part of the lessons, students learn to automatically identify sounds in spoken words. The focus is on vowels because they are the primary point of confusion for most students who qualify for Phonics Blitz. The development of strong phonemic awareness is the basis for a student’s clear understanding of concepts taught in the Phonics part of the lessons. The lessons also teach students to easily count, segment and blend syllables, because a surprising number of older readers do not have do not have syllabication skills.
Phonics - Each lesson introduces and teaches a new phonics concept. The concepts are introduced explicitly in a cumulative, systematic sequence. Manipulatives are used extensively. Students use magnetic letter tiles to learn letter-sound correspondences, with an emphasis on common vowel spelling patterns. Letter tiles also help students understand complex spelling conventions. For example, when learning about adding suffixes to base words, students manipulate letter tiles to learn when to double the final consonant, drop the final e, or make no change. Students use SyllaBoards to easily read unfamiliar multi-syllable words.
Reading Words and Sentences – Students read decodable words in isolation and decodable sentences. Words selected for word lists and sentences are intentionally challenging so that they prepare students for reading academic text. Oral reading builds students’ confidence that they can read well. While reading aloud, students receive immediate and positive error correction to help them develop the habit of reading words accurately. By lesson 11, students are reading and spelling words such as quintuplet, ecstatic, and uninhabited, and the words become more challenging as the lessons progress. As individual students read aloud, teachers monitor which students are mastering the concepts and developing good reading habits and which students need more help and practice.
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