Kindergarten students experience hands-on learning in lessons that seamlessly integrate phonemic awareness, phonics, handwriting, alphabet knowledge, spelling, word work, and sentence writing. Instruction is systematic, explicit, and teacher modeled.

During lesson activities, students hear and produce isolated sounds (phonemes), associate the sounds with letters (graphemes), segment beginning sounds in spoken words, and blend sounds in both spoken and printed words.

Students learn the 25 single letter alphabet phonograms and practice manuscript letter formation. Students use spoken words based on pictures to isolate phoneme(s). Students are also introduced to 40 additional phonograms (digraphs and trigaphs) used to read and write high frequency words such as sh in she, ee in meet, aw in saw, ay in day, wh in when, th in that, oo in foot. Students are guided to write spoken words that use specific digraphs being learned. Thus, the sound-symbol correspondents (phonograms) are presented both in isolation and through words. A key word is not connected to a phonogram, e.g., students do not learn the sounds of “a” by connecting it solely to “apple.”

Beginning in Lesson 11, in addition to introducing new phonogams, each lesson includes phonogram retrieval practice routines that use both flash cards and dictation with guided self-checking.

Students learn the upper case and lower case letter pairs and letter names.

Handwriting instruction closely guides correct letter formation in activities without pencil and paper as well as with pencil and paper. Lettr strokes: Lessons 1-10. Lower case letters: Lessons 11-36. Capital letters: Lessons 16-41.

Word work includes chunking by syllables and segmenting sounds as students work from the spoken word to the written word. In addition, various lesson activities include sound manipulation as students work with rhyme, alliteration, and medial vowel sounds. Lessons 11-80.

Sentence writing includes teacher guided thinking like a writer. Dscussion includes following the wrtiting process, formulating an idea into a sentence, and usng mechanics purposefully, i.e., capitalization, spacing, punctuation, spelling. Lessons 42- 80.

Lesson rituals include fun music, recitation, and chart creation-supporting rote memory catchy tunes and purposeful visual representations of their learning.

Each lesson activity is a chot student-facing video. This makes it easy to repeat video viewing when additional practice is needed during the same day or at a future time. This also makes it easy to spread the activities throughout the day or to divide the content of a single lesson over two or days.

Letters, Sounds, Words consists of:

80 Lessons (ranging from 15 to 30 minutes of video run time)

620+ Student-facing videos (average 7-8 per lesson, 3 to 15 minutes each)

82 Pages – Letter, Sounds, Words Student Work Text (BUY NOW)