Considerations for K-2 ELA Block Planning
Building your literacy block can feel like a daunting task. You’ve learned about the Science of Reading, you’ve read Speech to Print, you’ve followed all the social media groups, maybe you’ve taken LETRS. And still, when you sit down to plan your ELA block, you’re not sure where to start.
Today, I want to share my thoughts around how to build an intentional ELA block. My suggestions are my attempt to put the research into practice. I intentionally chose the word “considerations” in my title because the truth is, there is no curated, perfect evidence-based ELA block, because planning your block largely depends on your data and the children in front of you. However, I have taken evidence-based practices paired with the National Reading Panel’s findings to suggest some important things to consider when you structure your block.
Before we look at specific components of the block, there are few logistics to think about:
Timing
My preferred time for a K-2 block is 120 minutes. I organize the block as listed below, give or take 5-10 minutes for each component depending on what works best for you:
Word Study 30 minutes
Comprehension 30 minutes
Small Group 30 minutes
Writing 30 minutes
Here is a sample layout of the block to give you a visual:
A sample K-1 Block
I believe that 90 minutes is difficult to achieve if you are including writing in your ELA block. One work around for this is to include writing in your social studies and science blocks so that you are both building knowledge, saving time, and incorporating writing.
For small group times, you can see three groups in this amount of time if you add a five minute transition (10-12 minutes each group), otherwise you will see two groups each day for 12-15 minutes).
Adults
One key to an intentional literacy block (one that actually moves the needle for all students) is to use adults wisely. Do you have paraprofessionals that can sit with students during centers and provide corrective feedback while students reread decodable texts or find and identify letters in books? Do you have SLPs that can work on phonemic awareness with your students who are below benchmark in this skill? Talk with your teams– is it wiser to take a flexible service delivery approach and move kids to different classrooms during small group instruction? These conversations are vital. We don’t want to be silos, we want to be working with our teams on both aligning our instruction and building a system that works best for student reading outcomes. We want every student to get what they need.
Evidence-based instruction
As you sit down to plan, keep in mind two strong, theoretical models for skilled reading:
The Simple View of Reading & Scarborough’s Reading Rope. I can’t post pictures of the models here due to copyright, but click the hyperlinks and you can look at visuals to get you thinking. When you sit down to plan, center yourself in these models. Ask yourself, how am I going to teach both word recognition and language comprehension in my classroom every single day?
Data
The most important consideration when it comes to planning your ELA block is your data. Your data should inform you about which essential early literacy skills students are missing. Universal screeners like Acadience Reading K-6 or DIBELS will help you figure out which percentage of your kids are struggling with which skills. For example, if you teach first grade, and half of your class is below the benchmark on NWF (nonsense word fluency), teaching letter sounds and blending will be a primary focus for you during whole group instruction The higher the percentage, the larger the focus, and the smarter it is to bring that focus point into your whole group instruction. Universal screeners will also help you plan small group instruction, and we’ll talk about that below.
Breaking down the block
Keeping all of those factors in mind, let’s break down a sample ELA block, based on the four domains I mentioned above:
Word Study 30 minutes
Comprehension 30 minutes
Small Group 30 minutes
Writing 30 minutes
Word Study
When you think of word study, think phonics. This is where, if you have a phonics program, you will teach it! This is a whole group lesson, with opportunities to differentiate for students who are behind. We can differentiate by carefully selecting words for phoneme-grapheme mapping, spelling, and reading that match students’ skill levels. Our phonics lessons should also already be differentiated because they should spiral review previously learned skills. For example, even thought you might be teaching digraphs, your students will still practice reading and spelling CVC words each week.
During a phonics lessons, these are the components we should be hitting:
Introducing and practicing a new skill
Phonemic awareness
Sound isolation
Blending
Segmenting
Word chains
Reading words
Blending routine
Word reading
Spelling words
Phoneme grapheme mapping
Spelling dictation
Reading sentences
Writing sentences
Irregular word instruction
Reading decodable text
Practice & fluency
Rereading decodable text with a partner
Rereading words in isolation or within a sentence
Most programs don’t allot extra time to practice, but we cannot underestimate this portion of the word study component. Giving students extra practice is typically the thing they need in order to progress efficiently. Don’t leave this piece out. We want to have time for practice during word study as well as during centers in small group.
If you need more details about the specifics around these word study components, check out my post about non-negotiables for a phonics lesson to learn more! Or check out these phonics review packs I use with my students for independent review:
Review activities I use in centers
Comprehension
The comprehension portion of your block is whole group. This is where you:
Build background knowledge (use a video, image, or map to fill in pertinent information that will help students understand the text more deeply).
Teach vocabulary (teach 1-2 high utility words before the text, pause and locate during the text, review after the text).
Read aloud (think aloud and show students how you understand what is happening in the text, ask questions to promote understanding)
Model and practice comprehension strategies (not the primary focus, but as needed)- (summarizing, main idea, monitoring comprehension)
Teach sentence level comprehension (pull a sentence from the text and teach the functions of words within the sentence- who did it? What did they do? How did they do it?)
Teach figurative language (pull a sentence from the text and teach the meaning)
Teach inferencing (model making inferences and practice together)
Teach text structure (choose a variety of texts over the course of 1-2 weeks that exemplify different text structures)
You don’t have to teach ALL of the above every single day. Explore with the time you have and what you can fit in.
A basic structure for your comprehension lesson is:
Build background knowledge (5 mins)
Pre-teach vocabulary (5 mins)
Read aloud and lesson (10-15 mins)
Closure and check for understanding (5 mins)
You are reading as many texts as you can with your students that emphasize one overarching theme or topic as indicated by your knowledge based ELA curriculum or science and social studies curriculum. If you don’t have a knowledge-based curriculum, Core Knowledge is free, scripted, and all laid out for you. And, if you need support structuring your reading comprehension lesson, check out my reading comprehension lesson plan template.
The template I use to plan comprehension lessons.
Small groups
Small groups should be based on essential early literacy skills. The three domains under which we organize our small groups are typically:
Decoding
Fluency
Comprehension
In K-2, your groups will typically fall somewhere beneath domains 1 and 2, but not always. Below is a sample of small groups from 1st grade. The groups are in order from highest to lowest need. Group 1 will be the highest need group– the kids who are furthest below the benchmark and are likely also receiving pullout support.
Group 1: Letter sounds (missing more than half the alphabet), phonemic awareness (blending and segmenting), successive blending, dictation/phoneme-grapheme mapping. *see daily
Group 2: Letter sounds (missing a few), phonemic awareness (blending & segmenting), successive blending, dictation/phoneme-grapheme mapping *see 4x week
Group 3: Digraphs, blends & phonemic awareness (blending & segmenting), successive blending, dictation/phoneme-grapheme mapping *see 3x a week
Group 4: At grade level- build fluency with decodable texts and work on spelling *see 2x a week
Group 5: Above grade level- build fluency with decodable texts and work on spelling, depending on skill levels, literature circles or reader’s theater. *see once a week
^these are just examples of potential group patterns. The key is, groups are flexible, meaning kids can move across groups as needed and when ready so they can continue to get the specific support they need to reach benchmark. If you want to dive deeper into planning your small groups, check out this post on K-3 small group instruction.
While you see small groups, the other students should be doing review activities. This is key, nothing they do independently should be new information. It should always be practice. Some options for centers are:
Listening to audiobooks
Phoneme-grapheme mapping
Word building with magnetic letters
Rereading decodable texts with a partner
Letter formation and handwriting practice
Phonics games
Spelling & word sorts
Independent reading (students choose their own books)
Writing
Writing can always be divided into two domains– composition and transcription.
For transcription in K-2, there should be a BIG focus on proper letter formation, handwriting, and spelling. These are the precious years we build basic transcription skills for our students, and handwriting, in addition to spelling, is one of them. We can’t forget that one intention of teaching systematic phonics is to also teach writing skills!
For composition, we should teach our kids how to form thoughts based on an idea or picture, and respond to a text they listened to during a read aloud. Summarizing is a high impact and valuable skill to learn, first orally. If we can teach students to summarize orally, this will greatly impact their writing skills in the future. When we do this, we teach them how to “talk their thoughts” and express thoughts in complete sentences. This is a foundational piece for skilled writing.
In general, keep a handwriting and composition portion for your writing component, and, the topic of writing should connect to the overarching theme you are studying. If your read aloud is about amphibians, students should be thinking and writing about amphibians, not what they did over the weekend.
Conclusion
To conclude, let’s look at a very simplified progression of skills from K-2 within the context of the National Reading Panel’s’ 5 pillars of reading, so you can see how these might impact your block planning:
These domains remain the same from K-5, but the specifics within some domains will evolve from easier to more complex. For example, in Kindergarten, word study will consist of learning basic letter sound correspondences, consonant digraphs, and consonant blends. In grade 2, however, word study will start to incorporate morphology and multisyllabic words.
Well, there you have it. I’m not going to lie, this one was a doozy to put together, because there is no silver bullet for the perfect ELA block. However, if you keep these considerations in mind, your students should be well on their journey to positive reading outcomes. What might you add to this list? I’d love to know in the comments!
