We are teaching a lot more background knowledge and vocab.”

Elementary Curriculum Coordinator Andy Larson

Phonemes and segmenting, morphology and decoding. The process of learning to read has never been easy. Now more than ever, studies on just how students learn to read, what works and what doesn’t, are at the forefront of thought with the May 2023 passage of the READ Act, state legislation that overhauled how reading is taught to elementary-aged children in Minnesota.
In District 200, the 2024-2025 school year has seen the rollout of the knowledge building curriculum Wit and Wisdom and foundational curriculum University of Florida Language Institute (UFLI). Together both curricula focus on providing students with five pillars of literacy: fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, phonics, and phonemic awareness. This change was spurned by passage of the READ Act. The bill styled itself as a return to science-based practices of teaching reading with the goal to get every Minnesota student to read at grade level.
Elementary Curriculum Coordinator Andy Larson helped select both curricula for the district. “When MDE approved curricula for the READ Act, they approved foundational programs and knowledge building programs, with the outline that districts adopt one of each, or they could adopt a ‘comprehensive’ program that had all of the components of literacy covered by one program. Our teachers liked the way UFLI was laid out and appreciated Wit and Wisdom's depth of knowledge, so those are two of the reasons that we selected that pairing,” said Larson.
The new foundational curriculum UFLI focuses on phonics and phonemic awareness, two aspects of literacy that were largely missing from many mainstream reading curricula and have become a point of increasing focus across the county in recent years.
Phonics, put simply, is understanding the sounds letters make. While that concept sounds simple given the 26 letters of the English alphabet, what any Englisher-language learner can attest to is that the English language relishes in breaking its own rules and generally being inconsistent. Those 26 letters produce 44 different sounds that can be represented in more than 200 different ways which often must be learned word by word.
Phonemic awareness on the other hand, is the ability to hear the different sounds within a word. While letters make their own sounds, within a word they can often morph together forming a single unit of sound, called a phoneme.
And example provided by We Are Teachers, an online resource for educators, is the words cat and night. The word cat has three letters and three phonemes. Here, each letter produces a single sound. However, that is not always the case. The word night also only has three phonemes despite having five letters. The middle three letters ‘igh’ produce a single phoneme.
Teaching students phonics and phonemic awareness puts the same skill to students in different ways: teaching them about the sounds letters can make, then having them work to identify those sounds within words.
This granular and often student-specific approach to reading, exemplified by phonics, is a stark contrast to previous thought on the practice of teaching students to read. Previous wisdom emphasized broad tactics of contextual awareness and a focus on instilling in students the love of reading. This method is known as three cueing or meaning, structure and visual (MSV).
Larson summarized the practice as “If they love to read and we teach strategies on working through the text themselves, they will learn.”
Three cueing attempted to build skills in students like using context clues of surrounding sentences and pictures if students came to words or phrases they did not understand rather than teaching letter sounds. It emphasized finding the main idea of a story by using context clues.
Despite the dominance of three cueing in the American education system for decades, “The science has honestly been around for a long time,” said Larson, continuing, “Publishers were able to convince people that their way was the right way—it also happened to be easier.”
ISD’s previous curriculum Making Meaning “more or less” fit into this school of thought, said Larson. It did not meet the new standards put forth by the READ Act.
Rather than broad skills, “the way our brains learn is much more systematic,” said Larson.
Through the Wit and Wisdom curriculum and UFLI, K-4 literacy has been upended. Thirty-minute lessons have expanded to 90 minutes daily based on two-day blueprints which build up a specific skill the first day, then use that skill the second. These skills, 128 in total, are based on letter/sound patterns.
These skills are built into topics like “life on a farm” or “the sea,” which provides vocabulary and context to students for when they come upon words they might not otherwise know like crustacean.
“We are teaching a lot more background knowledge and vocab,” said Larson.
This background and context, also known as scaffolding, “get[s] kids to read at a higher level even if they aren’t ready for it,” said Larson.
At the Jan. 22 ISD 200 School Board meeting, Larson presented on the implementation of Wit and Wisdom. He showcased student writing samples from kindergartners writing full sentences with capital letters and periods like “Cats have babies.” and “I like spring.”, all the way to the fifth graders at the middle school.
“Our middle school teachers are the ones who have talked about this the most. They have seen a drastic increase in the amount of writing that their students are doing than what they’ve done before,” said Larson.
While teachers including Larson have been surprised at just how much more students are expected to and then are able to read and write, difficulty has arisen in grades 2-4 because they’re entering the curriculum in the middle without the background skills being taught in younger grades. Backfilling these skills for the first few years of this program, especially during its initial implementation, is crucial.
“The rigor is what really has gone up,” said Larson.
Because teaching phonics focuses so deeply on specific granular skills rather than broad tactics, it is much harder to implement. Across ISD 200 teachers have been taking new training that instructs on a variety of different teaching strategies that are based on the science of teaching.
“The amount of work teachers have put in is truly astounding,” said Larson.
Larson spoke to the increased importance of upcoming conferences so that teachers could speak with parents about student-specific difficulties in the reading process.
As to what parents can do to help their students learn to read, hasn’t changed much. Reading with young children or having them read to a parent or guardian is “honestly still really, really good advice,” said Larson.