Program Support Materials

Flying Start to Literacy: PHONICS™ teaches phonics in a systematic and explicit process along with five other key components required for literacy development: oral language, phonological awareness, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Teaching Units follow the same structure throughout the program. Content is appropriate for the level of the students at each stage in the program.

Scope & Sequence

Stage One

Each lesson in the Stage One Units provides instruction on:

  • Oral language development and listening comprehension
  • Building a rich vocabulary
  • Phonological awareness: identifying and manipulating syllables and phonemes with spoken words
  • Phonics: letter-sound relationships and word building
  • Writing: forming lowercase and uppercase letters and words
  • High-utility words
  • Consolidated learning activities where students can practice new knowledge and skills.

In Stage One—with the focus on introducing the alphabet—the decodable books are read at the end of each module.

  • Module One’s nine letters and nine high-utility words are featured in the first set of books.
  • Module Two’s eighteen letters and nineteen high-utility words are featured in the second set of books.
  • The full alphabet with accompanying high-utility words are covered in Module Three’s decodable books.

Stage Two

In Stage Two, the basic structure of the lessons continues. Attention turns to:

  • Double letters
  • Adjacent consonants
  • Long vowels
  • Reading longer mutisyllabic and compound words
  • Morphology

In Stage Two, the Units Four and Five decodable books can be read at the end of each unit. Each book contains words with the letter-sound correspondence the students have just learned.

Stage Three

Stage Three focuses on less common letter sounds. Students further build their growing bank of high-utility words. Mastering this bank of high-utility words allows students to practice their new phonetic knowledge in the context of a sentence and in a longer, connected text.

In Stage Three, the Modules Six and Seven decodable books can be read at the end of each lesson.

Teaching Notes

Teaching Notes in Every Book Are Available for downloading from Okapi Digital Literacy!