Description
Our goal is to provide teachers with the tools and resources to teach all children to decode and spell in a manner that leads students to become joyful, skilled, independent, and metacognitive readers and writers.
Word-Wires is a comprehensive word analysis program that fosters a classroom environment where all students are honored for their personal strengths and literacy instruction meets them at their individual levels. Using Word-Wires, teachers can make instructional decisions that reflect a deep knowledge of linguistics, best teaching practices, and the individual needs of each student. We equip students with generalizable and transferrable skills for reading, spelling, and vocabulary acquisition.
Word Wires Book One continues the work begun in foundations through a year-long sequence organized into five units. It begins with foundational routines and classroom structures, then moves into the deep linguistic structure of English through an articulatory approach that teaches students to become ‘language scientists’ exploring how sounds are made in the mouth. From there, it introduces core phonics concepts for reading, paced to give blossoming readers useful tools as quickly as possible, while still reinforcing writing and spelling connections. Later units extend this work into multisyllabic words, suffixes, and common irregular patterns, before revisiting phonetic concepts again with spelling as a central goal.
The Word-Wires One Curriculum is aligned with the Common Core First and Second Grade foundational skills. While some of the lessons may work with older children, we recommend teachers use the Wired For Reading™ intervention program instead, as the tone and pacing of the Word-Wires One Curriculum is designed for use in a Core, Tier 1 First or Second Grade classroom.
Scope and Sequence:
Linguistic Based Phonological Processing
- Feel and hear all consonant sounds
- Feel and hear universal vowels (ee, ah, oo and uh)
- Blend, isolate and manipulate three to six sounds and their order in words with universal vowels
- Feel and hear all other vowel sounds
- Blend, isolate and manipulate three to six sounds in words with universal vowels
- Correctly sequence sounds in there to six sound words
- Segment words into syllable beats
Foundational Literacy Concepts
- Syllable Segmentation
- Compound Words
- Homonyms
- High Frequency words
- Word Origin
- Vocabulary
- Handwriting
- Homophones
- High Frequency words with uncommon spelling patterns
- Contractions
Phonics with an emphasis on reading
- Universal Vowels (ee, ah, oo)
- Closed Vowels (short)
- Open Vowels (no, me)
- Silent e (name, note)
- R-controlled (ar, or, ur, ir, er)
- C expectancy
- Qu, x (Copy consonants)
- Doubling f, l, s, and z at the end of a single syllable word
- Tch, dge
- Diphthongs and vowel teams: Ou, oi, oy, au, aw, oo, oo
- G expectancy
- More Vowel Teams: Ow (snow), al (ball), igh (light) ew (screw)
- Y says /i/ – (; y says /e/
- Breaking written words into syllables using Vowel Yanking
- Consonant le syllables (noble, simple)
- Schwa
- Nonsense word Reading with all known patterns
- Flexibility between vowels that say their name and short sound – wind, wind
Morphological Concepts (Meaning Units)
- Base Words and suffixes (inflectional endings)
- Reading the suffix -ed, -s, -ing
Phonics with an emphasis on spelling
- High Frequency sight words
- All single syllable vowel patterns (short, open, R-controlled, Silent e, Vowel Teams -digraphs and diphthongs)
- Spelling with the suffixes -ed, -ing, -s
- Making spelling choices between open, silent e, and vowel digraphs (ea/oa/ai-/ay) when writing vowels that say their name
The curriculum set includes:
Three Volumes
- Part 1 (Units 1-3),
- Part 2 (Units 4-5),
- Appendices (Black Line Masters)
Teaching Tool
- 1 Mouth Mat Folder (A high quality file folder with the mouth pictures printed on the inside and a blank grid on the outside to speed up set-up for mouthy games. Includes two sheets of mouth pictures to cut out and adhesive dots for assembly)
