In many phonics programs (including my Orton Gillingham training) a lot of time is spent on teaching consonant blends (r-blends, s-blends, etc..) and having students showing mastery of words such as swim, trip, and frog. In reality if we teach students how to blend words (blend is a verb) with the sounds they know we can have students reading longer (4-5 phoneme words) much faster. I used to spend 7-8 weeks of instruction in first grade teaching blends. Since switching to the UFLI program, words with 4-phonemes are introduced early on and then built over time with the phoneme-grapheme correspondences students have been taught. For example if you have taught /t/ /r/ /a/ /p/ then the word “trap” is now accessible.

When using units from Fish Tank ELA I always maintain the topic, task, and text provided but occasionally found it useful to add in additional texts about the topic. This program has wonderful daily writing but the addition of daily oral language and syntax development has made the lessons even stronger. We do not have to give up teacher autonomy when adopting a new curriculum.

I compared one popular reading program which uses a small group for all philosophy and my foundational skills block. Students in the popular reading program would receive 60 minutes of foundational skills instruction per week and 240 minutes of independent work time. In my foundational skills, block students are receiving 45-60 minutes of instruction per day and only 10-15 minutes of time is expected to be independent for students who are at or above grade level expectations. During the independent practice time students are either practicing reading or writing connected to the skill we are learning. This will drastically increase the amount of instructional time students receive.