DLI 1st grade guide

Canyons School District

You are receiving a Phonics Chip Kit The Phonics Chip Kit helps teachers explain phonics patterns with colored manipulatives and sound boxes rather than teaching individual word reading. When students are taught patterns they are more likely to pronounce an unknown word correctly because they see that it contains the same pattern as a word they already know. Focusing on teaching patterns leads students to generalize better. Placing chips in sound boxes is not new; it’s known as the sound-spelling mapping technique using Elkonin boxes. By placing a string of blue-red-blue chips in sound boxes, students see that there must be a consonant after the vowel for the sound to be short. Orange signals there’s something unique about a consonant digraph, where one sound is spelled with two letters. A silent-e chip highlights that it takes two vowel letters to spell the long sound even though a consonant separates them. In a two-syllable word, syllable bars focus students on looking for the pattern in each syllable.

Although phonics and word decoding are the foundational underpinnings of reading, it is important to note that improving reading achievement does not end with phonics mastery. There is more to instruct with reading, including vocabulary, comprehension, fuency and deeper phonemic awareness. However, with the implementation of the Phonics Lesson Library (PLL), foundationally explicit strategies will give students strategies to code words which in turn will open up the door to literacy.

Adapted from 95%group PLL brochure