It is well established in the research that letter naming is highly correlated with foundational skills readiness, therefore students need to know 21 letter names before they begin small-group reading in the SIPPS program. We know that students who know 21 letter names are better equipped to engage in the foundational skills work as it gets increasingly complex.
The SIPPS program uses a spell-out strategy for introducing high-frequency words. This strategy allows students who have not mastered spelling-sound relationships to make connections between the graphemes in a word and the word itself. This routine focuses students’ attention on three critical cues: all the letters, in sequence, from left to right. Students have to know the letter names in order to engage in the routine.
As the students learn letter-sound correspondences, you can support orthographic mapping by identifying the regular and irregular grapheme-phoneme correspondences in words and having the students say the sounds for the spellings. The sound-out strategy is built into the instruction in SIPPS, Fifth Edition.