Our Second Grade Phonics Scope and Sequence
Sep 13, 2022
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Knowing what to teach and when to teach it is one of the most basic parts of planning your phonics instruction. Unfortunately, many programs have a scope and sequence that doesn’t make sense. Topics jump around with little thought to what students already know and what they don’t know yet. Another big difference between other phonics scope and sequences and ours is that we have review built into our structure.
It takes kids between four and six weeks to learn a new phonics pattern. Most programs teach one pattern a week. That scope and sequence is setting your students up for failure. They don’t have enough time to process and automatize what they are learning. Our program builds in a daily review of previous patterns. So, students are actively working with closed syllables while they are learning about open syllables. They will review closed syllables for six weeks after we teach them.
It is also easier to build this review into second-grade phonics because we work with multisyllabic words. Students have to work with different syllable types to read and write these words.
We built our second-grade phonics scope and sequence by thinking about which lessons would get kids reading the most words the fastest. Here is what we came up with:
Week 5: vce syllables, sounds of s
Week 6: consonant + le with open and closed syllables
Week 11: long a spelled ai and ay
Week 12: Long e spelled ee and ea
Week 29: r-controlled + consonant le
Week 32: final stable syllables: tion and sion
Week 34: when the letter a makes the short /o/ sound
You may be wondering what all of this review will look like. There are two ways we review. First, at the beginning of every lesson, teachers show picture cards, and students sound them out and spell the word. The picture cards will be from all of the review patterns as well as the current pattern. Second, all of our units come with printable picture cards. We use these in stations where students can use them to play games or quiz each other. Keep out the review patterns so that students can work with them for the whole six weeks.
You, of course, are welcome to alter this scope and sequence to fit your students’ needs. No scope and sequence is perfect. In our experience, it is far easier to have a starting place and adjust from there instead of staring at a blank piece of paper. Good luck with all of your planning! Please reach out with any questions, comments, or ideas. We are always ready to learn from other teachers!
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