Imagine Sonday System Essentials (EK–E5) products are structured, multisensory, grade-level phonics instruction designed for whole class instruction. Each grade level contains 180 lessons, one for each day of the school year. The lessons focus not only on accuracy but also on automaticity of English decoding and encoding. They'll also help you determine who in your class may benefit from additional reading instruction (i.e., enrollment in Sonday System 1 or 2).
The Sonday System products cover the 5 essential components of reading instruction—phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension—and are based on Orton-Gillingham methodology aligned with Science of Reading research. The system is named after its creator, Arlene Sonday, who was a Founding Fellow and the first president of the Orton-Gillingham Academy.
The essential elements of Orton-Gillingham instruction are:
- Direct and explicit instruction: No one is born knowing how to read; we all have to be taught. Learning to read is not natural (unlike learning to speak, for example); therefore, it must be taught explicitly. EK–E5 use a gradual release model of I do, you do, we do and never assume students can guess or already know the answers.
- Simultaneous multisensory activities: Students see, hear, and feel/do all at the same time, which creates new neural pathways in the brain. The tactile component of the reading exercises is tracing to help blend sounds, while the tactile component of the spelling exercises is Touch Spelling to help with phoneme and syllable segmentation.
- Systematic and cumulative: Spelling instruction begins with the easiest and most common sounds and concepts and progresses to the more difficult and less common ones. Each step is based on concepts previously learned. Reading lists at each step include only patterns that have already been taught. This increases success and builds confidence in budding readers.
- Synthetic and Structured: The order in which sounds are introduced is based on a carefully designed scope and sequence that progresses from easier skills to more difficult ones and separates the introduction of sounds that may be easily confused, so that students have time to master each concept. Students are taught to blend and segment words with progressively more phonemes and which use more difficult patterns only after they master each previous concept.
- Diagnostic and prescriptive: Mistakes are fixed in the moment in direct response to student performance. Students are provided with multiple repetitions to target errors and train the brain for automaticity. Lesson plans are designed to be easily individualized for student need based on continuous assessment.
EK–E5 teach both reading and spelling, with a dual goal of automaticity and accuracy. Repetition is used to achieve automaticity. To build accuracy, the Essentials products explicitly teach the English language rules.
The topics covered in each program are:
- EK: Phonological and phonemic awareness, alphabet knowledge, letter formation, phonemic mapping of single consonants and short vowels, blending and writing CVC words
- E1: Review of EK, vowel teams, consonant digraphs, fszl rule, beginning and ending blends, VCe, compound words, some r-controlled vowels, high frequency sight words
- E2: Review of E1, contractions, basic suffixes and prefixes, three-letter blends, song c and g, syllable types and syllable division patterns, high frequency sight words
- E3: Review of E2, Cle, doubling rules, E rules, more suffixes and prefixes, high frequency sight words
- E4: Review of E3, roots, advanced digraphs and trigraphs, more suffixes and prefixes, high frequency sight words
- E5: Review of E4, schwa, two-syllable doubling rule, accent patterns, advanced roots and affixes, Latin and Greek morphology
The systems are designed for whole-class, teacher-led instruction. Instruction is expected to begin at lesson 1 for each grade level, so there is no placement assessment before beginning the program. However, students do complete a Mastery Check after every 5-10 lessons (varies by grade level) to provide ongoing data collection in both reading and spelling. Material introduced in previous grade levels is reviewed in the early lessons of each grade level.
Tip
Review the Scope & Sequence documentation for more detail about which topics are covered at each level.
Timing is central to the lessons in Sonday Systems. The lesson plan for each level is a very structured 20-minute plan. Most lessons in most grade levels contain the same 5 lesson components in each session (with the first half of EK being the major exception). The routine and familiarity of the lesson plan lets students know exactly what to expect and minimizes the time you need to spend preparing for class. It's important to use a timer and not devote more time to any component than what is allotted in the plan.
Another key tenet of the Sonday philosophy is error correction. It is done in a very matter-of-fact way that doesn't single students out for their mistakes. In fact, students learn to identify and correct their own errors. This approach has been shown to improve student confidence when reading.
Next steps:
- Read our Foundations paper, Reading Research and the Sonday System, for more background and details.
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Learn about the 5 steps of each level in Sonday System Essentials.