© by Vista Higher Learning, Inc. All rights reserved. | TG P-1 | Connect to Phonics PLUS Teacher Guide PHILOSOPHY AND RESEARCH Connect to Phonics PLUS is a systematic and explicit standards-driven foundational skills program designed specifically for developing readers. This powerful solution develops phonemic and phonological awareness and literacy skills through engaging, dynamic lessons while addressing the needs of every student. Connect to Phonics PLUS is aligned with the Science of Reading (Castles, Rastle, & Nation, 2018) and provides a scope and sequence of purposeful literacy instruction for our youngest learners. The Science of Reading is built on abundant research—best illustrated in Scarborough’s (2001) “Reading Rope”—that reveals how young students best learn to read: increased automaticity in word recognition (phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition) and a more strategic approach to language comprehension (background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge). Accurate and efficient recognition of words has major implications for comprehension. When we competently recognize words, we maintain our train of thought, thus improving our comprehension. Effective decoding leads to improved comprehension, but simply adding phonics to a curriculum doesn’t guarantee that students will be able to break down and put together sounds. Rather, explicit and sequenced phonics instruction is necessary to thoughtfully provide a foundation, so students build skills to read and comprehend. Connect to Phonics PLUS guides student progress along a research-supported continuum of learning. Research from the National Reading Panel (2000) indicates there are five pillars to literacy instruction that must be addressed: (1) phonemic awareness, (2) phonics, (3) fluency, (4) vocabulary, and (5) comprehension. Connect to Phonics PLUS provides teachers with an organized and dynamic approach for teaching all five critical subskills. The scope and sequence of instruction in Connect to Phonics PLUS ensures that students have the needed skills to transition from learning to read to reading to learn. Through purposeful instruction, students weave the many “strands” of the reading rope, preparing them for a lifetime of reading (Scarborough, 2001). Students understand how to “use reading as a tool for learning, as texts begin to contain new words and ideas beyond their own language and their knowledge of the world” (Chall & Jacobs, 2003, paragraph 3). Phonemic Awareness It is important for students to notice and work with individual sounds in spoken words before moving to written forms. This is called phonemic awareness. It involves being able to isolate, identify, and segment sounds. Students begin blending sounds to form words. This is done at the listening and speaking level first. That is what distinguishes it from phonics. Research indicates those who develop phonemic awareness learn to read and spell more efficiently (Foorman et al, 2016; Kame’enui et al 2002; National Reading Panel, 2000). Research specifically supports activities that focus on the following areas as effective—all of which are explicitly included in this curriculum: • Blending: Students combine individual phonemes to form words by blending the phonemes. They also blend when they combine onsets and rimes to make syllables and combine syllables to make words. • Segmenting: Students break words into their individual phonemes to segment the words. They also segment words into syllables and syllables into onsets and rimes. • Phoneme manipulation: Phonemic awareness instruction is most effective when students are taught to manipulate phonemes by using the letters of the alphabet. This manipulation includes blending phonemes to make words, segmenting words into phonemes, deleting phonemes from words, adding phonemes to words, or substituting one phoneme for another to make a new word. Phonics Students must develop knowledge of the soundsystem relationship. Phonics instruction teaches students the relationships between the letters (graphemes) of written language and the individual sounds (phonemes) of spoken language. Students then learn to use these relationships to read and write words. Research has consistently proven that explicit instruction in phonics is essential. This
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