The goals of the lessons in SIPPS Beginning Level, Lessons 1–11 are to launch students into reading by introducing a small set of sounds, modeling blending/segmenting, providing immediate success with high-frequency words, and establishing habits for decoding, fluency, and spelling. What’s changed is that the lessons provide more explicit instruction for using pre-decodable stories to support students with print concepts (including word boundaries, directionality, and punctuation), letter-recognition, and high-frequency words.
To better meet these goals, the following updates have been made in SIPPS, Fourth and Fifth Editions:
- The Reading a Story routine (Step 5) includes both a read-aloud and a choral reading of the pre-decodable story.
- Rereading a Story (Step 1) and Fluency Practice (Step 7) include choral reading and additional practice with word recognition, accuracy, and expression.
- The story posters in Lessons 1A–11 now have just one culminating illustration. You can still use the original story posters with illustrations to provide support for word meanings (this type of support is particularly helpful for students who speak a home language other than standardized English and for multilingual learners), or you may choose to use the updated versions which have fewer illustrations (these can be found on the Learning Portal).
- The Little Books are not used in the revised lessons, but they can be used at your discretion (for example, for repeated, partner, or independent reading or during fluency practice to provide support for word meaning).
By updating these lessons, we can better ensure students have sufficient practice with several important concepts before they start the hard work of decoding in Lesson 12.