Phonics Scope and Sequence

You don't need a program, just a systematic and explicit approach

“Help! Can you recommend a good phonics program? Preferably one that’s affordable because I’ve already spent so much money.”

This breaks my heart for so many reasons. The only reason I’m going to get into here is that you don’t need a program to teach phonics. And it’s much easier to build upon your professional knowledge base (and common sense/gut feelings) as well as adapt your instruction and pacing to meet your students’ needs if you don’t have someone else’s program dictating to you what you should do and when.

That being said, I am going to share my phonics scope and sequence—not to tell you what to do, but to give you some ideas. You might take this and tweak it to match your teaching style, situation, and students’ needs or you might get some ideas on how to modify or add to a program that you are already using in your classroom.

I incorporate phonics into (almost) the entire school day—the Name Game (less systematic but truly engaging), phonics block (systematic and explicit), workshop (individualized, application), intervention time (highly individualized reteaching, review, reinforcement), writing time (application), and a separate sight word practice time (good for practicing and mapping those irregular words). I won’t be able to write out a detailed description of everything I do; but, I will share what my phonics block looks like and spell out my scope and sequence. It should be enough to get you started and you can always ask for clarification or more information.

By the way, when I say “I,” I really mean “we.” My teammate, Debra Robbins, uses the same scope and sequence. We change it just a bit every year as we learn more about best practice and more from our students. And we are both consistently happy with the results.

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Our day—and our 20-minute phonics block—begins with the Name Game. This involves guessing letters, segmenting the sounds in names, figuring out which letters are behaving (saying the right sound) and misbehaving (also called violators), and labeling the sounds with “short a,” “hard c,” “long i,” etc. This is how we choose our special helper for the day. The Name Game is highly engaging, becomes more sophisticated as the year goes on, and you’re guaranteed to get a big bang for your buck.

After that we move directly into systematic and explicit phonics instruction, which starts on the first day of school. If you have a phonics block in your schedule, show your students right away what will be happening during that time. All you’re going to do on the first day is sing the ABC song, teach the letter Aa, and do some phonemic awareness exercises with /a/; that means you’ll have plenty of time to also talk about expectations for behavior and paying attention.

Speaking of attention, any phonics work you do will only be valuable if you command the attention of your students. It is okay to say, “Pick your head up.” “Look at where I’m pointing.” “Let’s do it again because _____ didn’t say it with us.” “Pay attention; we come here to learn.”

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It is important to sing the ABC song, slowly, and point to the letters while doing so. We do this August through November. The reasons for this are:

• As the students learn the song, the names of the letters will become a part of their phonological lexicon. If they’ve repeatedly heard the letter names, it will be a lot easier to learn them and attach meaning to them.

• Some students will learn letter names this way before you actually explicitly teach them.

• Later in the year, when students are reading or writing and they need to refer to the alphabet on the classroom wall, they will be able to sing the song to themselves and find the letter they’re looking for.

Once they know the song well (about two weeks into the school year), it is time to play Pop Up while singing the song. Do your usual—sing the song and point to the letters—and have students quickly stand when you point to the letter with which their name begins. It works best if their name tag is in front of them. Realizing that these squiggly things with funny names and sounds are connected to their names is huge; all of a sudden, the alphabet is important and exciting. I keep a cheat sheet handy during pop up so I can quickly tell who is not standing up when it’s their turn. About a month later, the kids pop up on the last letter of their first name (new cheat sheet needed) and wow, you can see the sudden fascination with attention to the end of names and words.

Cheat sheet I keep handy to make sure everyone pops up at the right time during the Pop Up game.

After singing the ABC song and before learning a new letter, it is important to chant all the letters/sounds you have already taught. So, if we’re learning letter Tt, we’ll first review Aa through Ss. The video below showing the daily review is from January when we have already learned the entire alphabet, several digraphs, two diphthongs, and added in soft c, soft g, and long a. After we finish with the review, I’ll teach long e. You can see the “hole” in the alphabet cards where the long e card will go.

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If you’re wondering, I hang all the alphabet cards right away, leaving holes to add the long vowels, soft c, and soft g later as well as a big space beneath to add cards for digraphs and diphthongs. I need to make cards for the vowel teams. Another project! If you want to try this alphabet, I’ve included links. The pictures I chose all have actions and are based on years of choosing and using my favorite pictures from other purchased alphabets. Also, I made the consonants blue and the vowels red, like magnetic letters. Now, my alphabet is exactly as I want it. After opening, click on File and Make a Copy; that way, you can edit and make it just the way you want it, too.

26 Alphabet Display Cards

Alphabet Display Cards PLUS long vowels, soft c, soft g

Advanced Phonics Display Cards (digraphs and diphthongs)

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I introduce a new phoneme (and its related grapheme) every other day. We do phonemic awareness exercises with each new sound for two consecutive days through December. After that, we do the phonemic awareness exercises one day and spelling practice on paper with the new phoneme the other day. So, for example, when we learned the /oo/ sound (as in spoon), I had the students try to write boo, moon, and food by themselves. Then I modeled and they could check their work. You could also reverse this—you model first and they copy you—depending on where they’re at with their skills.

This next video shows the phonemic awareness practice I do with students on a daily basis. You’ll see three different activities—emphasizing the sound in words, blending, and segmenting. Initially, we only practice emphasizing the beginning sound. A few weeks later, I add in blending and we do that for a couple of weeks. Then I add the segmenting piece and from thereafter we do all three skills every day through at least December. I want students to be adept at these three skills by mid-year.

And, now, finally, the scope and sequence. What do I introduce and when? What activities do we do? Since this post is already lengthy, I will provide the scope and sequence and write more about the related activities at another time. Just know, it is important to find time outside of your daily phonics block to let students apply what they are learning to real reading and writing, with both guided and independent activities. If they don’t have these opportunities, phonics will quickly become boring and meaningless.

Phonics Scope and Sequence

As always, I hope you get a few ideas that you can take and make your own. We are all working under different circumstances, with different students, and, of course, we have our own teaching styles and preferences. I truly hope that you don’t have to spend your hard-earned money purchasing a phonics program. And I encourage you to adapt your instruction and pacing based on what your students need, not on what any program tells you to do.