The Skills strand of the Core Knowledge Language Arts program teaches students the decoding skills needed for (future) independent reading. Each Skills lesson begins with a warm-up, reviewing previously taught content in reading, writing, and/or grammar.

By the end of this unit, students will be able to:

1. With prompting and support, ask and answer questions (e.g., who, what, where, when) requiring literal recall and understanding of the details and/or facts of a fiction text;
2. With prompting and support, use narrative language to describe characters, setting, things, events, actions, a scene, or facts from a fiction text that has been read independently;
3. With prompting and support, describe illustrations from a fiction text read independently, using the illustrations to check and support comprehension of the story;
4. Read aloud in a group, with a partner, or alone at least 15 minutes each day;
5. Demonstrate understanding of basic print conventions by tracking and following print word for word when listening to a text read aloud;
6. Demonstrate understanding that a systematic, predictable relationship exists between written letters and spoken sounds;
7. Recognize and name the 26 letters of the alphabet in their lowercase forms;
8. Segment a spoken word into phonemes, e.g., given bat, produce the segments /b/ /a/ /t/;
9. Identify whether pairs of phonemes are the same or different, including pairs that differ only in voicing, e.g., /b/ and /p/;
10. Indicate whether a target phoneme is present in the initial/medial/final position of a spoken word, e.g., hear /m/ at the beginning of mat and /g/ at the end of bag;
11. Listen to one-syllable words and tell the beginning or ending sounds, e.g., given dog, identify initial /d/ or final /g/;
12. Demonstrate basic knowledge of one-to-one letter-sound correspondences by producing the primary or basic code sound for every consonant ‘b’, ’bb’ > /b/; ‘d’, ‘dd’ > /d/; ‘f’, ’ff’ > /f/; ‘g’, ‘g’ > /g/; ‘h’ > /h/; ‘j’ > /j/; ‘c’,’k’, ‘ck’, ‘cc’ > /k/; ‘l’, ’ll’ > /l/; ‘m’, ‘mm’ > /m/; ‘n’, ‘nn’ > /n/; ‘p’, ‘pp’ > /p/; ‘r’, ‘rr’ > /r/; ‘s’, ‘ss’ > /s/; ‘t’, ‘tt’ > /t/; ‘v’ > /v/; ‘w’ > /w/; ‘x’ > /x/; ‘y’ > /y/; ‘z’, ‘zz’, ‘s’ > /z/; ‘ch’ > /ch/; ‘sh’ > /sh/; ‘th’ > /th/ (thin); ‘th’ > /th/ (them); ‘qu’ > /qu/; ‘ng’, ‘n’ > /ng/;
13. Read and write one-syllable short vowel CVC words, e.g., sit, cat, wet, not, cup;
14. Read and write one-syllable short vowel words with initial or final blends/clusters, e.g., tr-, fl-, sp, -st, -nd, -lt, etc. and initial or final consonant digraphs, e.g., ch-, sh-, th-, -ch, -sh, -th, -ck, -ng;
15. Read, spell, and write chains of one-syllable short vowel words with consonant blends/clusters and/or consonant digraphs, e.g. stab > slab > slap > slash
16. Read decodable text that incorporates the letter-sound correspondences that have been taught, with purpose and understanding;
17. Ask and answer questions to clarify information in fiction text read independently;
18. Describe familiar people, places, things, and events and, with prompting and support, provide additional detail;
19. Hold a writing utensil with a tripod (or pincer) grip and make marks on paper;
20. Trace, copy, and write from memory the letters of the alphabet accurately in lowercase form;
21. Capitalize the first word in a sentence and the pronoun I;
22. Name and use commas and end punctuation while reading orally;
23. Recognize, isolate, and write single-letter, double-letter, and digraph spellings for consonant sounds;
24. Spell and write any CVC, CCVC, CVCC, or CCVCC word that uses the letter-sound correspondences taught in kindergarten;
25. Begin to write phonemically plausible spellings for words that cannot be spelled correctly with current code knowledge, e.g., write won for one, sum for some, etc.; and
26. Use the inflections –s, –es, and –ed as a clue to the meaning of an unknown word.

Unit 7 - Segmenting and sound spelling