This facilitator’s guide is designed to assist professional learning communities (PLCs) in applying evidence-based strategies to help K-3 students acquire the language and literacy skills needed to succeed academically. This document is a support for educators watching the IES videos of foundational language and literacy instruction.
The Knowledge and Practice Standards define the knowledge and skills that all teachers of reading should possess to teach all students to read proficiently. These competencies can be used to guide professional development for educators.
Elkonin boxes build phonemic awareness skills by segmenting words into individual sounds, or phonemes. To use Elkonin boxes, a child listens to a word and moves a token into a box for each sound or phoneme. In some cases different colored tokens may be used for consonants and vowels or just for each phoneme in…
This is a handy guide that explains how to use Elkonin boxes in instruction, with the helpful addition of word lists for teaching.
Put Reading First is a summary of the findings from the Report of the National Reading Panel, summarized in a brief, easy-to-read comprehensive guide to evidence-based reading instruction. Intended for educators and administrators, this guide aims to improve reading outcomes for children in the early grades, summarizing key research findings on phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency,…
Dr. Tim Shanahan clarifies what we know about rhyming in this blog post. Should rhyming be a key component of early reading instruction?
Use this lesson plan to teach students to segment words into their individual phonemes.
This is a lesson plan and student material sheet for a “Say It and Move It” lesson that explicitly teaches students to segment words.
This is a lesson plan for the explicit instruction of isolating the middle sound in words.
Use this lesson plan to explicitly teach students to identify the final sound in words.
This lesson plan outlines an instructional routine for explicitly teaching students to isolate the first sound in words.
This document provides a list of words for phonemic awareness instruction, with words carefully organized by number of sounds and stop/continuant sounds.
Funding for ONlit.org is provided by the Ministry of Education. Please note that the views expressed in these resources are the views of ONlit and do not necessarily reflect those of the Ministry of Education.
© 2025 ONlit. All rights reserved.
