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Savvas K-5 Foundational Scope & Sequence

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Savvas K-5 Foundational Scope & Sequence

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When Young Readers Get Stuck (Nell Duke)

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When Young Readers Get Stuck (Nell Duke)

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There’s an art—and science—to providing prompts for young readers when they struggle.

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Chp. 1 of Choosing  & Using Decodable Texts (Blevins)

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Chp. 1 of Choosing  & Using Decodable Texts (Blevins)

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Chp. 1 of Choosing & Using Decodable Texts (Blevins)

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Teach Sight Words As You Would Other Words (Mesmer & Duke)

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Teach Sight Words As You Would Other Words (Mesmer & Duke)

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Teach “Sight Words” As You Would Other Words

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Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System: Doesn’t Look Right, Sound Right, or Make Sense (Reading Rockets)

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Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System: Doesn’t Look Right, Sound Right, or Make Sense (Reading Rockets)

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Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System: Doesn’t Look Right, Sound Right, or Make Sense

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My district, like so many others, uses Fountas and Pinnell’s Benchmark Assessment System (BAS) as the primary measure of student reading progress. But if you’ve had doubts about the assessment and the ways BAS data is often used, you’re on to something…

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What do you need to consider when selecting an academic progress monitoring tool? (Dr. Devin Kearns)

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What do you need to consider when selecting an academic progress monitoring tool? (Dr. Devin Kearns)

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What do you need to consider when selecting an academic progress monitoring tool? | NCII

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In this video, Dr. Devin Kearns, an Assistant Professor of Special Education in the Department of Education Psychology at the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut and NCII Trainer & Coach, discusses things to consider when selecting an academic progress monitoring tool.

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Reading & Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Reading Difficulties

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Reading & Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Reading Difficulties

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Overcoming Learning Difficulties

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Parker et al., 2015 A Brief Report of the Diagnostic Accuracy of Oral Reading Fluency and Reading Inventory Levels for Reading Failure Risk Among Second- and Third-Grade Students (1).pdf

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Rights Without Reading Levels (Matt Burns)

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Rights Without Reading Levels (Matt Burns)

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Explicit Spelling Instruction or Invented Spelling (Tim Shanahan)

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Explicit Spelling Instruction or Invented Spelling (Tim Shanahan)

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I teach kindergarten. We've been arguing over whether we should teach spelling or developmental spelling. Which is best?
Shanahan response:
You're asking if learning to spell comes more surely from "transmission" (teaching by telling or demonstrating) or from "construction" (learning through discovery or operating on the world). Arguments in educational psychology have raged over this for decades.

I think the dispute - at least with regards to spelling - is misleading. The two approaches are posed as contradictory, that teachers must choose one way or the other.

I don't see it that way.

Explicit spelling versus invented spelling is a false dichotomy. I encourage both - and did so in my classroom teaching, in my research, and these days even in what I urge on my grandkids.

What does the research say? There is an extensive body of studies showing that explicit spelling instruction results in better spelling and reading and enables better writing. There is also a body of research into invented spelling showing that it results in better phonemic awareness, word reading, and spelling.

Although these approaches may appear to emerge from different philosophical positions, they both confer learning advantages to children. We should not forget that.

It's easy, of course, to caricaturize proponents of each these approaches. Those who advocate explicit instruction are unreformed behaviorists who champion spelling accuracy at the expense of creativity. Those on the invented spelling side are a bunch of Rousseau-inspired hippies rebelling against society and its rules - including spelling rules.

None of that claptrap has anything to do with the real issues. Everyone wants kids to spell well, and as I pointed out, there is plenty of research supporting both approaches.

What does it mean to "teach" developmental spelling?

Let's clear one thing up right away. Developmental spelling isn't something that you teach.

You encourage it, you nurture it, but you don't teach it, per se.

That's the whole idea of "invention." The kids are using what they know about letters, sounds, and words to try to determine reasonable spellings.

I know some on the explicit spelling side dismiss this approach as being akin to the cueing-system guessing that they deplore. But that isn't the case. One of the major reasons for engaging kids in spelling invention is to induce them to closely think about the phonemic structure of words and the relationship of those phonemes with letters.

That isn't guessing, it's analysis - analysis beneficial to kids' learning.

Not surprisingly, many phonics advocates prefer "speech-to-print phonics." Part of the reason for this may be that speech-to-print - getting kids to go from sounds to letters - provides a greater opportunity for kids to develop phonemic sensitivity.

If you have any doubts, compare the number of phonemes a nascent writer analyzes when composing a single sentence, and the number included in a good phonemic awareness lesson. That's also likely the reason that invented spelling is a better predictor than is accurate spelling of growth in reading during the first year of reading instruction (Senechal, 2017).

We encourage developmental spelling because kids may balk at writing in fear of mistakes. A lot more learning happens when students set aside those anxieties. Encouraging students, in this case, means urging them to spell the words in they think they are spelled and not to worry about getting them exactly right. "Just try," we tell them.

We also need to nurture developmental spelling. There is no learning benefit from laborious corrections. That feels like punishment and kids will avoid attempting to spell if they think their errors will lead to that. Celebrate their efforts rather than reproving them. Bring parents into this equation too - they need to know why you aren't correcting those misspellings (and that you recognize those spellings as incorrect).

One big benefit of invented spelling is that it provides teachers with a window into their students' understanding of the spelling system. It is valuable to analyze students' spelling attempts to try to understand what is going on. That way instruction can be better targeted on students' needs.

If you are uncertain how to do that, I strongly endorse Richard Gentry's books on spelling or Charles Temple et al.'s Beginnings of Writing, or Words Their Way. They all have a ton of insight and good teacherly advice.

I know some teachers and parents worry about invented spelling. Their concern is that once kids misspell a word, they will learn the error. That isn't really how it works. Young children's spellings are more fluid than that. Their hypotheses about the spelling system are based on what they know, and as they know more - from phonemic awareness and phonics lessons, and from reading words - they adjust their hypotheses.

That's where formal spelling instruction comes in (Graham, 2000). That teaching adds to what children know about words and becomes part of the grist that they mill. At first, knowing the spelling of a word likely only affects how a child spells that word but over time (memorizing isn't enough) - as children incorporate that new information into their thinking, their spelling improves more generally. Over time, they incorporate the new information, and their spelling attempts get closer and closer to accuracy.

Of course, kids make plenty of spelling progress just by learning to read (Share, 1999), but with explicit instruction students can make even more rapid progress (Treiman, 2017, p. 273). Good spelling instruction is not the enemy of invented spelling - it's just another source of information that feeds that invention.

Some facts about early spelling:

Invented spelling increases student awareness of the speech segments in words (Martins & Silva, 2006)

Invented spelling, together with alphabetic knowledge and phonemic awareness, influence reading and spelling development (Oulette & Sénéchal, 2017)

First-graders who are encouraged to spell as well as they can end up with significantly better reading scores than those that relied on traditional spelling instruction alone (Clarke, 1988)

Invented spelling and phonemic awareness training lead to the same level of phonemic awareness processing (Ouellette & Sénéchal, 2008; Ouellette et al, 2013), even for students at risk of reading difficulties (Senechal, et al., 2012)

Explicit phonemic awareness instruction increases the quality of students' spelling inventions (Ball & Blachman, 1991)

Giving students appropriate feedback on their invented spelling leads to greater progress (Ouellette, Sénéchal, & Haley, 2013)

Explicit spelling instruction should do more than get kids to memorize words - it should focus on the analysis of spelling, including considering spelling alternatives (Berninger, et al, 1992)

Explicit teaching in spelling improves spelling and increases the vocabulary diversity in student writing (Graham, Harris, & Adkins, 2018)

Adding explicit spelling instruction to developmental approaches improves spelling (Graham, 2000)

Explicit spelling instruction improves spelling, reading, and writing (Graham & Santangelo, 2014)

References

Ball, E. W., & Blachman, B. A. (1991). Does phoneme awareness training in kindergarten make a difference in early word recognition and developmental spelling? Reading Research Quarterly, 26(1), 49-66. doi:https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.26.1.3

Berninger, V. W., Vaughan, K., Abbott, R. D., Begay, K., Coleman, K. B., Curtin, G., . . . Graham, S. (2002). Teaching spelling and composition alone and together: Implications for the simple view of writing. Journal of Educational Psychology, 94(2), 291-304. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.94.2.291

Graham, S. (2000). Should the natural learning approach replace spelling instruction? Journal of Educational Psychology, 92( 2), 235-247. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.92.2.235

Graham, S., & Santangelo, T. (2014). Does spelling instruction make students better spellers, readers, and writers? A meta-analytic review. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 27(9), 1703-1743. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11145-014-9517-0

Graham, S., Harris, K. R., & Adkins, M. (2018). The impact of supplemental handwriting and spelling instruction with first grade students who do not acquire transcription skills as rapidly as peers: A randomized control trial. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 31(6), 1273-1294. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11145-018-9822-0

Martins, M. A., & Silva, C. (2006). The impact of invented spelling on phonemic awareness. Learning and Instruction, 16(1), 41-56. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2005.12.005

Ouellette, G., & Sénéchal, M. (2008). Pathways to literacy: A study of invented spelling and its role in learning to read. Child Development, 79(4), 899-913. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2008.01166.x

Ouellette, G., & Sénéchal, M. (2017). Invented spelling in kindergarten as a predictor of reading and spelling in grade 1: A new pathway to literacy, or just the same road, less known? Developmental Psychology, 53( 1), 77-88. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0000179

Ouellette, G., Sénéchal, M., & Haley, A. (2013). Guiding children's invented spellings: A gateway into literacy learning. Journal of Experimental Education, 81(2), 261-279. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220973.2012.699903

Sénéchal, M. (2017). Testing a nested skills model of the relations among invented spelling, accurate spelling, and word reading, from kindergarten to grade 1. Early Child Development and Care, 187(3-4), 358-370. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2016.1205044

Sénéchal, M., Ouellette, G., Pagan, S., & Lever, R. (2012). The role of invented spelling on learning to read in low-phoneme awareness kindergartners: A randomized-control-trial study. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 25(4), 917-934. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11145-011-9310-2

Treiman, R. (2017). Learning to spell words: Findings, theories, and issues. Scientific Studies of Reading, 21(4), 265-276. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2017.1296449

P.S. Evidence that students will not need later to "unlearn" their early misspellings comes from a rather extensive body of longitudinal developmental evidence on children's spelling growth over time (references below). This week my granddaughter shared with me her year-long kindergarten journal - which reveals yet again the fluid nature of young children's spelling attempts as they try to master an understanding of the phonological/orthographic structure of words. For those, for whom such descriptive studies are insufficient, there are also experimental tests of the idea refuting the notion that invented misspellings are learned (Ehri, Gibbs, & Underwood, 1988). The preponderance of evidence suggests it is better to encourage developmental spelling attempts than to try to prevent children from putting to use what they are learning about words. Learning to read and spell words is more than a rote memorization task - nascent readers benefit from analyzing the speech stream and attempting to map letters to those sounds.
References
Bissex, G.L. (1980). GNYS AT WRK: A child learns to read and write. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Clemens, N. H., Oslund, E. L., Simmons, L. E., & Simmons, D. (2014). Assessing spelling in kindergarten: Further comparison of scoring metrics and their relation to reading skills. Journal of School Psychology, 52(1), 49-61.

Ehri, L. C., Gibbs, A. L., & Underwood, T. L. (1988). Influence of errors on learning the spellings of English words. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 13(3), 236-253. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/0361-476X(88)90024-0

Ferreiro, E. (1978). What is written in a written sentence? A developmental answer. Journal of Education, 160, 25-39.

Frost, J. (2001). Phonemic awareness, spontaneous writing, and reading and spelling development from a preventive perspective. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 14(5-6), 487-513.

Gentry, J. R. & Ouellette, G. P. (2019) Brain words: How the science of reading informs teaching. Portsmouth, NH: Stenhouse Publishers.

Godin, M., Gagné, A., & Chapleau, N. (2018). Spelling acquisition in French children with developmental language disorder: An analysis of spelling error patterns. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 34(3), 221-233.

Henderson, E. H. and Beers J. W. (1980). (Eds.) Developmental and cognitive aspects of learning to spell: A reflection of word knowledge. Newark, Del.: International Reading Association.

Huxford, L., Terrell, C., & Bradley, L. (1992). 'Invented' spelling and learning to read. In C. M. Sterling, & C. Robson (Eds.), Psychology, spelling and education; psychology, spelling and education (pp. 159-167). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.

Kamii, C., & Manning, M. (1999). Before "invented" spelling": Kindergartners' awareness that writing is related to sounds of speech. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 14, 16-25.

Lazo, M. G., Pumfrey, P. D., & Peers, I. (1997). Metalinguistic awareness, reading and spelling: Roots and branches of literacy. Journal of Research in Reading, 20(2), 85-104.

McBride-Chang, C. (1998). The development of invented spelling. Early Education and Development, 9(2), 147-160.

Lie, A. (1999). Effects of a training program for stimulating skills in word analysis in first-grade children. Reading Research Quarterly, 26, 234-250.

Ouellette, G., & Sénéchal, M. (2017). See above.

Read, C. (1971). Preschool children's knowledge of English phonology. Harvard Educational Review, 41, 1-34.

Read, C. (1975). Children's categorizations of speech sounds in English. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English

Read, C. (1986). Children's creative spelling. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Zhang, C., Bingham, G. E., & Quinn, M. F. (2017). The associations among preschool children's growth in early reading, executive function, and invented spelling skills. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 30(8), 1705-1728. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-017-9746-0

Zhang, Y., Nie, H., & Ding, B. (1986). The ability to manipulate speech sounds depends on knowing alphabetic reading. Cognition, 24, 31-44.

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Explicit Spelling Instruction or Invented Spelling?

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Explains why engaging students in invented spelling is such a good idea. When children try to spell words they have to think about the phonology and letter-sound relations. Evidence shows this to be beneficial. The information students should use to fuel this invention is explicit spelling, phonemic awareness, and phonics instruction.

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SAP Report: Growing Vocabulary Matters A Lot.  Too.

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SAP Report: Growing Vocabulary Matters A Lot.  Too.

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Building Stronger Readers and Writers- One Word at a Time

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Building Stronger Readers and Writers- One Word at a Time

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Building Stronger Readers and Writers—One Word at a Time

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This post is free to read, so please ‘like’ it via the heart below and share it widely.

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How to Build Fluency with Text in Your Classroom

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How to Build Fluency with Text in Your Classroom

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How to Build Fluency with Text in Your Classroom

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Importance of fluency in beginning reading and how to teach it in the classroom.

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Clearing Up a Couple of Misunderstandings About Fluency (Shanahan)

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Clearing Up a Couple of Misunderstandings About Fluency (Shanahan)

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Our school uses XXXXXXX [widely used commercial program] in the primary grades to teach fluency. I don't like it because so many children can read fluently but don't understand what they are reading. Wouldn't it be better to focus on reading comprehension?
Shanahan responds:

Thanks for your question. I'll answer it, but I suspect your premises may be wrong.

I don't buy the idea that our instructional choice is fluency or comprehension. We need to teach both. The simple view of reading emphasizes the important role each plays (Gough & Tunmer, 1987), and there is a substantial body of evidence showing the value of instruction of each (NICHD, 2000). Both of these constellations of skills are necessary to successful reading, but neither is sufficient.

If students cannot decode text fluently, they won't comprehend it - no matter how advanced their intellectual and linguistic abilities. (If you don't believe me, try to read text written in the Cyrillic alphabet). Likewise, no matter how well students can decode, they won't comprehend a text if they lack adequate language development (oral and written) and world knowledge.

We need to emphasize explicit daily teaching of comprehension and fluency (along with work on word knowledge-decoding and morphology, and writing). When I visit classrooms, one of the most frequent gaps that I see is the lack of explicit teaching of text reading fluency; there just isn't much of that. Perhaps that's why your district purchased that program.

These days many districts monitor children's reading development, evaluating skills like letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, decoding, and oral reading fluency. If a child does poorly in one or another of these, then the youngster gets extra instruction (Tier 2) in the specific skill. Possibly that was the target of the purchase of that program-for use with kids who lag in oral reading fluency.

That's not an unusual approach, but it often means that kids get a lot of skills work without comparable emphasis on language development and reading comprehension. That may be the source of your complaint: the disfluent kids get a dose (or an extra dose) of fluency instruction... but without instruction aimed at building up the other strand of abilities.

If the problem is the latter, then I cheer your school for doing what it can to enhance text reading fluency. I'm on their side; that is a smart move. Research shows that fluency instruction pretty consistently improves reading comprehension

But, like you, I jeer them for only monitoring decoding, while neglecting the language side of the equation. Kids should be receiving daily classroom instruction focused on vocabulary, morphological knowledge, syntax, cohesion, text structure and the like. And, there should be Tier 2 and 3 interventions with that kind of focus, as well.

There was another premise in your letter, and let me express some doubts about that one, too. You say a lot of primary grade students at your school can read fluently but without comprehension. I hear that claim often, usually from "experts" trying to denigrate fluency instruction. It's fashionable.

The problem with the claim is that it doesn't match well with large amounts of empirical data. Oral reading fluency tends to so closely correlated with reading comprehension, particularly in the primary grades, that there just can't be large numbers of those children.

One possibility is that your criterion for determining that a child is "fluent" may not be sufficiently rigorous.

Some teachers consider a reader fluent if he/she can read many of the words right. But it also matters how easily the student is able to do that. If students must devote a lot of cognitive resources to figure out words, then there won't be enough left over to think about the ideas.

Reading rate is used to estimate that ease, though the point isn't fast reading as much as automatic reading. If students can easily and relatively quickly read the words, that won't compete with comprehension.

Not long ago a second grade teacher was showing me a student who she thought to be adequately fluent; he was reading accurately (that is, he pronounced the author's words correctly), but he did this at about 40 words correct per minute. That means he was as fluent as an average late year first-grader, not a mid-year second-grader (look at the Tindal & Hasbrouck norms on this site under Resources). She thought he was fluent, but the data said, "no."

It also matters if the reading sounds like language. Are the students pausing in the right places-paying attention to punctuation and meaning? Or, are they just reading lists of words that are laid out horizontally?

Kids are reading fluently when they are easily decoding words accurately in a way that sounds like language. I'll bet some of the kids you are judging to be fluent, really aren't.

The research on this is clear: (1) we should teach text reading fluency - in the classroom, in interventions, and in special education programs; (2) the teaching of fluency doesn't take the place of phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, or writing instruction - it is just one, along with those others, of the important things that needs to be taught; and (3) students' text reading fluency needs to be accurately estimated - considering accuracy, automaticity, and expression simultaneously.

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Clearing Up a Couple of Important Misunderstandings about Fluency | Shanahan on Literacy

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text reading fluency, this discussion explores the role that oral reading fluency or text reading fluency plays in reading development and instruction

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Support for Families- SCD Slides (Aug. 2025)

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Check out this Doc designed by Jessica BARBATO.