Tanya Quick step-by-step guide with pictures and links to help you effectively implement UFLI in your classroom. This thorough phonics program focuses on the systematic and explicit teaching of foundational skills necessary for skilled reading. UFLI is based on repetition and the ‘I do, we do, you do’ technique. I have implemented it in my small group interventions (grades 1-4) this year.
How to Implement UFLI in your Resource Class
Materials needed to implement UFLI: I use the UFLI manual, the online slides and the supplemental resources. This guide was a great help to help me get started as well. My groups range from 1 to 5 students.
Day 1 (around 30 minutes)
Step one focuses on phonemic awareness; having students practice blending and segmenting words. This is when that mispronounced word like, “budderfly” turns into “butterfly”, and the student has an ah ha moment. I simply follow the instructions in the manual for this step.
Step two is the visual drill. This helps students isolate graphemes and associate them to a phoneme, which they can then use to read an unknown word.
Step three is the auditory drill. Each student takes out their whiteboard, and writes the grapheme that corresponds to the phoneme I say out loud (see manual for list of sounds). As the programs builds up, more graphemes are associated to more phonemes. They emphasize to focus on saying ‘blendable sounds’.
Step four is the blending drill found in the ‘blending board app‘. I provide an iPad for each students and select the beginning, middle and finals sounds in focused based on what the manual states. We then start the word chains and the students have to identify the sound to change in order to spell the new word. They love clicking on the graphemes and changing the letters. This is one of their favourite parts of UFLI. Parents also appreciate this app to help complete the homework on. More about that later.
Step five and the last step of day 1 is to introduce the new concept. Use the manual to guide you through this section. Essentially, you are introducing a new sound, discussing it, breaking it down, reading it in words and writing it. This is where you can pull out your elkonin boxes.
This terminates day one of the lesson. We often have some time left over to play corresponding word games. If you need ideas or suggestions, see these flashcards/ review games (always a hit and never gets old- the kids truly love them and do not realize they are learning).
Day 2 (around 30 minutes)
Ready to reinforce the new concept from day 1 and all other concepts. Start again from step 5, but a more detailed and in depth version today.
Step 6 and the second favourite for my students is the word work mat. Once again, thank you to UFLI for providing this free resource. Although time consuming, I made a word work mat for each student. I bought round velcro stickers on Amazon. This helps with decoding and encoding and so fun to do. There are also virtual word work mats, which work great too. The script for the word list is found in the manual.
Step 7 is to review/introduce irregularly spelled words a.k.a heart words. These words do not follow typical grapheme to phoneme correspondence. Once again, these heart words are free on the UFLI website, here. As you can see in my photo, I purchased a pocket chart from Scholastics and use it to store the heart words. We add new ones as the lessons go on. As I am teaching younger students, I like to also display the sight words that are not heart words.
To reinforce the activities associated to the heart words in the manual, I like to put on these 1-2 minute videos explicitly teaching the ‘heart’ parts and the ‘square’ parts from Really Great Reading. For the students that really need extra support, I set them up with a take home sight word fluency practice.
As an extra activity, students can use my finger pointer to point to all the displayed words to read them. One student is the teacher, and the other is the student. They love this.
Step 8 and the last step is to read the connected text, a.k.a the decodable text. These texts build on the sounds and the heart words learned in previous lessons and create a wonderful opportunity for the student to shine <3. I print these before hand and place them in a duo-tang labelled for each student.
Supplemental Activities- Roll and Read
Love, love, love this game. I made a duo-tang with all the photocopies needed (you can find then here, just scroll down to the end of the page, under ‘Complied Lesson Resources‘ and choose your grade level). This is a free resoruce from UFLI that supplements each lesson. Great to play on review days.
