Hello Phonics is a structured literacy routine for small-group, skill-based reading instruction. Unlike Guided Reading, where students are grouped by similar Reading Level and expected to read predictable leveled text containing words with phonics skills students have yet to be taught (shown on the top left), students in Hello Phonics small group instruction are grouped by phonics skill based on a simple to complex Scope and Sequence skill progression. As shown to the bottom left, text that students read during a Hello Phonics group is decodable because the text is controlled to words with new and previously explicitly taught phonics skills.

The routine of a Hello Phonics lesson is based on the research guidelines outlined in the National Reading Panel Report (2000) and the National Early Literacy Panel Report (2008). While the focus of a Hello Phonics lesson is ONE phonics skills, all five areas of reading...Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary and Comprehension are extension in the lesson as well. The number of minutes per component are shown in the figure to the right. The Hello Phonics small group lesson routine includes ONE new phonics focus skill per lesson set. One lesson takes 20 instructional minutes, and one lesson set is complete after three 20-minute lessons over three days. Hello Phonics lesson are designed for differentiated small group phonics instruction at Tier 1. As you can see in the table to the right, a small group phonics lesson is MORE than just phonics! A lesson includes phonological awareness, sight words, decoding, spelling, vocabulary and comprehension.

Before beginning differentiated small-group, skill-based literacy instruction called Hello Phonics lessons, the teacher should assess each student's phonics skill knowledge using our free Quick Placement Assessment. There is a student copy, as shown on the left, while the teacher records on a separate Recording Sheet. The assessment is administered individually and student begin reading sentence #1. The teacher discontinues the assessment with a student's score on a sentence falls below 80% accuracy. At which point, the teach places them in one of 12 groups. Teachers report that the Quick Placement Assessment is easy and quick to administer to a class of students. While it is done individually, it only takes about 30-40 minutes to assess a class of 24 students.