When looking for a curriculum, I try to find a curriculum that has all of these factors, focusing heavily on phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency. We will discuss in detail what all this means and looks like below!

I am in no way sponsored by this curriculum (Heggerty, hit a gurl up) but love it so much, I had to share it with you. In my opinion, phonemic awareness is crucial for mastery in reading. As you can read in the graphic, phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with individual sounds in words. For example, when the child hears the word chip, they should be able to count the sounds in chip, /ch/ /i/ /p/. They should be able to change the ch to the sh sound. They should be able to take away or add any sounds in a word. Phonemic awareness plays a critical role in helping children learn to read and spell.

Students complete all phonemic awareness activities auditory. There is no writing. Because of this, I feel that students thrive during this portion of the day. Once students learn the layout of this curriculum, it should take 7-10 minutes a day. That isn’t long for something that is so beneficial for kids. If you would like to check this curriculum out, you can go to the Heggerty website for a sample.

For my Phonics/ Reading Curriculum, I chose a curriculum created by Jen Jones, a former teacher. Jen has studied the Science of Reading in depth and has done a great job making sure all important elements are included in her lessons. I am by no means telling you that this has to be the curriculum you use. Some aspects of this curriculum will be geared to the classroom but most all of it will be useful to your homeschooling day to day activities. In my latest blog, I talked about how important it was to have a systematic approach to your reading lessons. This curriculum does a great job laying out each skill that will be taught. The pink section is typically for kindergarten, orange is first grade, and yellow is second grade. You can see exactly how her curriculum is laid out for three years. For me, this is so beneficial to my planning.

This is a more detailed scope and sequence for the pink (kindergarten) curriculum. On the left, you will see the decodable books that you can purchase including the skills that they will learn. On the right, you will see heart words, also known as high frequency or sight words that are included in each book. Each skill included in these lessons are an important step in your phonics journey. What is phonics? I am glad you asked!

In your reading lessons you will need some sort of phonics curriculum.

What is phonics?

Phonics is an approach in which each symbol (letters) is represented by a sound. Phonics breaks words up segmenting each sound in the word.

For example, the word bat has three sounds. Each letter represents a different sound /b/ /a/ /t/

You can see in the graphic beside there are only 26 letters but 44 sounds. How is that possible? Think about the word ship. It has four letters but only three sounds. The sh together makes one sound. /sh/ /i/ /p/.

This is all what phonics is about!

Here are some examples of phonics activities that you can pair with your reading curriculum to help reinforce skills taught.

This is an example of Jen Jones Lesson plans for her reading curriculum, you can find them here! Things that I love about is there are some phonemic awareness activities, heart words (same as sight words), phonics review, new phonics skills, decoding practice, some spelling dictation, and decodable books. We will talk about what exactly decodable books are in a minute. These lessons plans also comes with plenty of activities such as BINGO, playdough smash and reads, word ladders, vocabulary cards, spelling dictation sheets, assessments, ect. There are teacher scripts so you know exactly what to say to teach your children. There are progress charts for students to track their accomplishments as well as data tracking sheets. Honestly, Jen thinks of everything you would need to complete a lesson.

If you scroll up, I stated that vocabulary is crucial for reading comprehension. Why? Background knowledge before reading will help students comprehend the text. One thing I love about this curriculum is that vocabulary is explicitly taught using vocabulary cards and this vocabulary list at the beginning of the decodable books.

We obviously need to be asking children to recall what they just read. This is the end goal in reading. We want to make sure that students are mastering comprehension. Jen has created comprehension questions that are at the end of the story. This helps open the curriculum for the day and get to work. Not much planning involved which is a win for many homeschool parents.

Fluency is an important part of reading comprehension. Fluency is how fast a student can read while having accuracy. If students read too slow, it will be hard for students to comprehend. I love that Jen Jones added fluency practice in her decodable books.

Warm Ups: This isn’t necessary but a great way to practice their sight words that are found in the text. My daughter and I go through each word. In this curriculum Jen will show you exactly how to teach these words. I set a timer for one minute. my daughter sees how quickly she can read through these words.

Decodable Books: This is one of my favorite parts of Jen Jones curriculum. It is so important for your student to have ample time to practice these new skills that you teach and this is a great way to do it. If you pick up a regular book, even if they are the beginner reader books, there will be many words that have rules that they have not learned. This is why decodable books are so critical.