Kindergarten Report Overview

The Fundations Kindergarten materials reviewed partially meet the criteria for alignment to standards and research-based practices for foundational skills instruction. The instructional materials reviewed for Kindergarten provide explicit and frequent instruction and practice in letter identification. There are limited opportunities for students to identify letters in meaningful print without the addition of supplemental texts.  Materials provide limited instructional support for general concepts of print. Materials provide limited phonological awareness modeling, practice, and review before phonics instruction begins. The program includes frequent opportunities for instruction and practice with newly-acquired phonics skills as students decode and encode words. Application opportunities for decoding phonetically-regular words is not evenly distributed across the program. The materials also lack systematic and repeated modeling that may be necessary for some students to achieve mastery of long vowel sounds. Materials include limited systematic instruction of high-frequency words and limited opportunities to practice reading of high-frequency words to develop automaticity. Opportunities for students to practice decoding to develop accuracy and fluency and to read emergent-reader texts for purpose and understanding is limited.