Welcome!

In this Grade 1 classroom, we’ll take a closer look at a skills-focused, English Language Arts lesson featuring activities that teach, reinforce, and develop students' foundational literacy skills. Skills lessons focus on phonological awareness, phonics and word recognition, print concepts, grammar and language conventions, writing, comprehension, and fluency. The research-based, intentional structure of CKLA ensures that all students develop strong literacy skills across all language domains.

Skills Lesson Structure:

Warm-Up
Introduce the Sound
Introduce the Spelling
Practice
Reading
Additional Support

Each section represents one lesson segment of a CKLA Skills Strand lesson. All the activities in this particular lesson focus on teaching foundational skills, except for the Reading and Additional Support segments. Each has a video showing an example of how the lesson segment might look in the classroom, a breakdown explaining the purpose of the segment, and key teaching materials and instructional guidance that are associated with that part of the lesson.

Review sounds and spellings from previous lessons.
Set the stage to engage in new learning.

Skills lessons frequently begin with a Warm-Up exercise. The Warm-Ups are quick reviews that help students focus on the lesson of the day. These are done orally and use multi-modality cuing and supports to assist students in focusing on the sound or sounds in the lesson. The Warm-Up can take different forms depending on which skills are focused on in the particular lesson.

Vowels in Focus

Students review all vowel sounds they have learned in this unit as the Warm-Up for this lesson. As a new vowel sound is introduced in this lesson, the Warm-Up is focused on acclimating students to the sound and feel of the different vowel sounds. In this way, the activity helps students ground the knowledge they gained before introducing new skills or diving deeper into alternative usages or challenging parts of language.

Engage orally with the new sound.
Explore how the sound is used.
Situate the sound within spoken language.

CKLA uses a systematic phonics approach that teaches students to read by blending sounds. This sound-first approach teaches the most frequent sounds and sound/spellings first, so students can access connected text more rapidly. The exercises in this segment often juxtapose different sounds to improve students’ ability to distinguish between them.

Listening for /ou/

This segment contains a listening exercise focusing on the /ou/ sound. Students first explore the sound by pronouncing it in varying voice pitches and volumes. The teacher reads different words containing the sound, taking care to clearly pronounce the part of the word containing the target sound. Lastly, in Sound Off, students identify the target sound in a short story Read-Aloud. The short text to the left is an example of the text being read aloud for this lesson, where students are instructed to touch their noses when they hear the sound.

Learn the letter representation of the introduced sound.
Integrate oral and letter understanding of the sound.
Gain knowledge about the spelling of the sound.

Students begin to form a deeper understanding of the way the sound they are learning about is represented in written form through activities involving both the sound as well as the sound/spelling. The code chart is used throughout the year to track the sounds the class has learned while helping students understand the extent to which the sound has alternative or irregular spellings.

Trace the Spelling

Students start out by tracing the spelling /ou/ on their tables while saying the sound. The teacher listens to evaluate students’ pronunciation and tracing of the sound and spelling. Students also complete the section related to the target sound in their Individual Code Chart. There is a brief discussion about how the large powerbar means that the sound will be spelled with /ou/ most of the time.

Practice writing words containing the newly introduced sound/spelling.
Use past and newly-gained knowledge of sound/spellings.
Participate in guided and independent practice.

Having been introduced to the oral and written parts of the new sound, students are prompted to practice writing words containing the sound. While practicing, students will deepen their skill in writing the letters associated with the sound and using these letters to form words and sentences. Usually this practice is based on an activity page associated with the lesson.

Ou, Out, Mouth

Students start their practice by writing and saying aloud the basic component of the sound of today's lesson, /ou/, on the Activity Page, as seen on on the right. Afterwards they go on to write the words out and mouth.

Read texts with increasing code complexity.
Develop fluency of language and understanding.
Read with increased accuracy, appropriate rate, and expression.

Students engage with connected text in almost every Skills lesson using the Student Readers, which are 100% decodable, meaning they only use words and spellings that have been explicitly taught and practiced. Throughout the grades, the Readers increase in text complexity, including increased amounts of academic and domain-specific words, and students are asked to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding through a variety of text-based tasks.

Re-Reading to Decode

In today's reading activity, students reread the story "The Two Mules” to practice sound/spellings from previous lessons. The newly-learned /oo/ sound/spelling from Lesson 7 is bolded, providing a visual scaffold for students. Tricky words, or words that do not follow usual spelling rules, are underlined. Students often return to the same text multiple times in Skills lessons to further improve their decoding experience. A formative assessment is also part of this lesson, prompting teachers to listen to individual students read aloud and to record observations in an anecdotal record. By listening to students and taking notes systematically, the teacher will have a chance of better understanding how students are developing.

Reinforce foundational skills from the lesson.
Provide on-the-spot intervention.
Extend practice in targeted skills.

Every Skills lesson concludes with an Additional Support section with recommendations for 30 minutes of extended instruction and practice activities, directly aligned to the skills taught during primary instruction. Given the range of decoding abilities within a class, the Additional Support exercises aim at addressing gaps in knowledge that students have.

Word Chaining

In this activity, students complete a word chaining exercise by separating sound/spellings in given words and then changing individual letters so that new words are formed. Chaining helps students with sound/spelling correspondences by requiring attention to individual sound/spelling changes as words are read or spelled. It reinforces students' ability to manipulate sounds in words in which only a single sound/spelling is changed, added, or deleted at a time. Chaining activities are completed by using a pocket chart with index cards or by writing on a blackboard, whiteboard, Smart Board, or chart paper. The two chaining sequences for today's lesson can be seen here.