That flexibility allowed us to fine-tune our differentiation down to whether a student was struggling with sight words or sounds within the same series of lessons.Īt the beginning of the school year, all students were given the SIPPS screener, which would place them within a 10 lesson range. However, by combining both first and second grade, suddenly we have 6 teachers for 12 small groups. There simply wouldn’t be enough time to differentiate beyond that. If a teacher were to teach SIPPS in just their classroom, they would be limited to roughly two small groups. I quickly learned that SIPPS is best used as differentiated instruction across multiple grade levels. The next day we had to sit in multi-grade level bands, with first and second grade seated together. That is what SIPPS is: an all-encompassing curriculum that helps support students throughout every part of their day. As I was mapping out my wall space, I realized that this curriculum was not only for thirty minutes every day but would be on display at all times. We had been told to find a dedicated space on our walls just for SIPPS materials. For once, I felt like we had found a curriculum that would help our students learn how to read.Īfter the training, we were given our SIPPS binders and were sent to set up our classrooms. It solidified the fact that learning how to read is challenging, but can be done systematically and in thirty minutes. The lesson was fast paced, engaging, and challenging. She created a fake language and taught us fake sounds, then had us read a story. Just as I started to lose faith in her judgment, she proceeded to teach a demo lesson. I gawked when she said all these components were to be taught in a thirty-minute time span. The students go through oral phoneme manipulation, letter sounds, a decodable word list, sight words, reading a story, and writing. Our previous curriculum had little to no instruction on how to guide students through phonics.Īs my literacy coach continued the training, she reviewed each component of the lesson. This is what I had been searching for throughout my career as I had been flailing trying to figure out how to teach first graders how to read. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, a curriculum purely dedicated to teaching phonics. SIPPS is an acronym that stands for Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words. As my literacy coach explained what SIPPS was, my interest was piqued by just the name alone. I had heard through the grapevine that this would be our new foundational skills curriculum. She was leading a training on a new phonics curriculum called SIPPS. In 2021, I entered our beginning of year staff training and met our new literacy coach.
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