Payne Education Center’s First Grade Foundations

Description: First Grade Foundations is a compilation of structured techniques for the multisensory teaching of language skills based on Orton-Gillingham-Childs concepts and Alphabetic Phonics, and is designed to be combined with any basal reading program. It is a scripted, sequential, repetitive and multisensory classroom curriculum delivering phonemic awareness, the forty-four sounds and ninety-eight spellings of the English language in a spiraling approach. Each lesson includes a decodable story based on the graphemes explicitly taught to facilitate fluency and prosody in reading. The morphological sources and grammatical structures contained within the curriculum provide the foundation for written composition. The program also includes assessment at approximately each fifteen lessons which enables the teacher to track student success.

First Grade Foundations (FGF) is a 4-day OSDE approved Structured Literacy training program that provides first grade teachers a multisensory scripted reading curriculum that meets the needs of a variety of students, from reading-disabled to gifted. First Grade Foundations features instruction in phonological awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, grammar, handwriting, and spelling. FGF allows teachers to be prepared for any student reading level with pre-literacy techniques and a comprehensive, balanced approach to the basics of language arts instruction. Each lesson contains a decodable story for fluency development and assessment. FGF can easily be supplemented with standard literature or literature from any basal reading program. Periodic student assessments occur every 15-20 lessons. Teachers who attend First Grade Foundations are able to access a support page on our website that is full of helpful instructional videos, curriculum resources, and supplemental materials.

Objectives: At the end of this course, trained educators will be able to:

• Demonstrate knowledge of the foundational concepts involved in oral and written learning.

• Demonstrate knowledge of the structure of language, including phonology, orthography, morphology, semantics, syntax, and discourse organization.

• Demonstrate the ability to teach phonological awareness, phonics and word recognition, fluent reading of text, handwriting, and spelling.
• Interpret and administer assessments for planning of instruction.

Hours:  4 Day 32 hours In Person