How to Teach Phonics with Your Grade-Level Team

Working with other teachers is hard. No doubt about it. You all have different teaching styles and viewpoints on what is important and how to teach it. When teaching phonics, you might want to teach the sounds in one order, and your colleague might want to teach them in another.

Or you might like some activities to do with students while other teachers prefer different ones.  How do you successfully teach phonics with your grade-level team?

Here’s a secret. Are you ready for it?

The order you teach the sounds and phonics patterns doesn’t really matter. Nope. It doesn’t. Yes, there are some guidelines that teachers and programs generally follow, like teaching short vowels and continuous sounds first, but no program teaches phonetic sounds in the exact same order as another.  It also doesn’t matter if you and your colleagues do different activities with your students.

Don’t get hung up on what you are teaching.  Pay attention to how you are teaching it.

What does matter when it comes to phonics instruction? What is important when working with a team of teachers?

Just Teach Phonics

Really, that’s the most important thing: focused teaching. Students aren’t going to learn the sounds of the letters and how to put them together (at least not as quickly) unless you actually teach them.

Just teach it.

Spend some time each day developing phonemic awareness, matching letters and sounds, blending sounds, segmenting sounds, and putting words together in meaningful contexts.  Pay attention to your phonics instruction and teach students that letters have sounds that make predictable patterns.  Practice those patterns and help students make connections.

Teach the sounds and how to connect them together. That’s basic phonics instruction.

Okay, now that you’re all teaching phonics, what else do you need to make sure you do across all classrooms?

Be Consistent

The second most important thing your grade level can do to help students learn phonics is to be consistent across all your classrooms.  Be consistent in how you are teaching the sounds and the skills students need to read words.

You don’t need to teach the same exact phonics pattern at the same time because if you’re grouping for instruction, the students will all be learning and practicing different sounds. However, how you teach the sounds needs to be consistent so that students can take those skills with them wherever they go.

If you are switching students to differentiated instruction, the sounds and skills you are teaching must be consistent across all classrooms.  Are you all pronouncing the stop sounds the same way?  Are you all teaching students to blend the same way?  Are you all teaching students how to approach an unknown word consistently?

Consistency counts.

Don’t get hung up on what you are teaching. Pay attention to how you are teaching it.

Teach How to Smooth Blend Sounds

This is a key skill to make sure each classroom is teaching correctly, whatever the sounds being taught.  Having taught struggling readers in second grade, one of the key skills they are missing is how to blend sounds.

Teach students how to connect the sounds together, which is called blending. I like to call it smooth blending.  We spend a lot of time elongating the continuous sounds to clearly hear how they connect with the sounds next to them.  We do it orally during our phonemic awareness time and we do it in print during our phonics time.  We stretch out the sounds and make them long if it’s a continuous sound.

Pay special attention to how you are addressing stop sounds and do it consistently. Stop sounds are very quick sounds.  Most students have difficulty blending stop sounds unless they are specifically taught how to pronounce them.  This is one area where consistency across classrooms helps.  When blended, stop sounds must be blended with the consonant or vowel sound next to it because they are such a quick sound.

With your grade level team, be consistent about how you are teaching students to blend sounds so that when students switch classes or move onto the next grade level, they have the skill set and foundation on which any teacher can build.

Use the Same Assessment to Inform Instruction

A good phonics assessment is a key component of your phonics program. You must be able to see what a student can and cannot do at a specific time of year. Do they know their consonant sounds? Vowel sounds? Can they read CVC words? How about blends and digraphs?

All of these questions can be answered by your phonics assessment. Yes, sitting with and assessing each student does take a bit of time, but knowing where students are in learning to read will help you focus your instruction. Really, that saves you planning and instruction time.  It pays off in the long run.

What should be included in a phonics assessment?  Each phonics assessment will be slightly different but should contain the build blocks of our phonics system, which includes: consonant sounds (both continuous and stop sounds), vowel sounds (short and long), CVC words, VCE words, blends, digraphs, common vowel teams, uncommon vowel teams, two-syllable words (with open and closed syllables), three-syllable words and possible, for your high readers, four-syllable words.

You are assessing students to see what they know and can do to inform your instruction. Don’t make it a high-stakes test.  Use the assessment to know what to teach.

With a clear assessment that is used across classrooms, you and your colleagues now have a common language to talk about students and their progress or lack of it.  A common assessment will also help you group students across classrooms and target instruction based on student needs.

Teach what the students need

Use the assessment to figure out what students need to learn and focus on those phonics patterns.  Going back to #1 above, just teach it.  If students need to learn to blend CVC words, give them a lot of practice with blending CVC words.

Small groups are the best way to target instruction within a classroom.  Teaching phonics whole group doesn’t allow you to hear individual students and what they are saying or not saying.  Group students with similar needs and teach a small group of 3-6 students.

I tend to group my lowest students in the smallest groups and then increase the group size as the skill level increases.

You can use any materials to teach what the students need to learn, as long as you are focused and you are consistent.

Talk to your grade-level partners about student progress

Don’t forget to communicate with your grade level team about student progress.  Either do this informally or schedule a formal time to meet and talk about the students.  Either way, keep a pulse on how each of you is teaching and how your students are learning.

Your teammates will have some good ideas that you can take back to your classroom.  Or they can help you troubleshoot a particularly difficult problem you may be having.  Likewise, you can lend a helping hand by giving input to their problems and issues.

Students will progress at different rates.  If you are switching students with other teachers, be sure that the groups are flexible and that you’re continually evaluating when students need to change groups, either up or down so that their needs continue to be met.  This can only happen with clear communication.

Some final thoughts

Learning to read is hard.  So is teaching students to read.  However, with clear, focused, consistent teaching, students do learn to read.  And, reading opens up a whole new world for them.