Building Strong Readers with UFLI

This year, our second graders are continuing to build their reading skills through UFLI Foundations, a structured phonics program that gives students the tools they need to become confident, capable readers.

UFLI helps us make reading instruction explicit, systematic, and engaging. Each day, students practice connecting sounds to letters, blending sounds together, reading words, and applying their phonics skills to both familiar and unfamiliar words.

What Does UFLI Look Like in Our Classroom?

During our UFLI lessons, students are actively engaged in reading and spelling activities. We practice:

• Phonics and sound patterns – learning how letters and letter combinations represent sounds
• Phonemic awareness – listening for and manipulating sounds in words
• Blending – putting individual sounds together to read words
• Encoding – using sounds and phonics patterns to spell words
• Decoding – applying phonics skills to read new words
• Word work – changing sounds or letters to create new words
• Dictation – listening to sounds and words and writing what we hear
• Reading connected text – applying the skills we have learned while reading sentences and stories

One of the most important parts of UFLI is that students aren't simply memorizing words. They are learning how to figure out words for themselves. As we introduce new phonics patterns, students practice using those patterns repeatedly until they become more automatic.

Why We Use UFLI

Strong readers need strong foundational skills. UFLI provides our students with consistent routines and plenty of opportunities to practice reading and spelling words using the skills they have been taught.

Our goal is for students to become accurate, fluent, and confident readers who can take the skills they learn during our phonics lessons and apply them when reading independently.

It has been exciting to watch our second graders grow as readers and see them become more confident in using their phonics skills each day. We are building the foundation that will support them as they continue to tackle increasingly complex words and texts!

We are so proud of our growing readers!