Puzzle Piece Phonics: Teacher's Guide

The full-color Teacher’s Guide makes it easy for teachers to achieve Word Study in the Balanced Literacy classroom

The Teacher’s Guide streamlines the instructional routines that are the cornerstone of Puzzle Piece Phonics, and outlines simple directions for implementing the daily lessons. The practice routines ground the instruction in research and quickly become second nature to teachers and students.

Puzzle Piece Phonics spans approximately thirty-five weeks of instruction and is organized around the essential phonics concepts for each grade:

Kindergarten—Building the Sorting Routine; Letter Identifi cation, Formation, and Sound; Short Vowels; Short A Word Families; Short E Word Families; Short I Word Families; Short O Word Families; Short U Word Families; Mixed Short Vowels; Short Vowels and Vowel_e

First Grade—Introduction to Word Study, Short Vowels, Digraphs, Blends, Controlled Vowels, Vowel_e, Vowel Teams, Open Syllables, Consonant Help Syllables, Irregular Vowels, and Long Vowel Review.

Second Grade—Introduction to Word Study, Correctly Spelling Consonant Patterns, Correctly Spelling Long Vowels, Correctly Spelling Schwa and R-Controlled Vowels, Correctly Spelling Irregular Vowels, Parts of Speech, Prefi xes and Suffixes, and Other Word Types

Each concept opens in the Teacher’s Guide with a Preparing for Your Week section to plan weekly instruction. Tips for anagement and Differentiation help teachers spin their lesson plans to meet the diverse needs of their students, and daily step-by-step instructions suggest ways to implement each routine.

This dynamic step-by-step process is repeated each week for each new set of letter-sounds. The Teacher’s Guide also includes connections to students’ Fluency Notebook and Learner’s Notebook practice, a guide for pacing the scope and sequence of the program, a week-by-week list of the sight words introduced, and a map that outlines the components of each puzzle piece and suggests how they should be displayed in the classroom.