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Word Study for the Balanced Literacy Classroom

Piece-by-piece phonics success for every student.

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2 Piece-by-piece phonics success for every student

Phonics can easily become the forgotten piece of Balanced Literacy, but by making word work the center of literacy instruction, other literacy skills fall into place. Puzzle Piece Phonics is designed to inspire, challenge, and support students—without creating more work for teachers. It’s offered in grade specific kits for kindergarten, first grade, and second grade.

Based on extensive research, this colorful, year-long phonics curriculum teaches K-2 learners to immediately apply phonics learning to authentic reading and writing. Illustrated, moveable puzzle pieces help students learn spelling and phonics patterns as a natural part of becoming fluent readers and writers.

Beyond its unique use of puzzle pieces, what sets this resource apart is its built-in support for students working on very different levels. Students learn new skills during whole-group lessons, then apply them at their individual working level through the differentiated components.

ABOUT THE CREATORSPuzzle Piece Phonics began when three teachers, Carolyn Banuelos, Danielle James, and Elise Lund, frustrated by the flaws in the phonics resources they used, harnessed their creativity, their curricular understanding, their practicality, and their can-do talents to design a program that reflects how students best acquire phonics knowledge. The result? A unique and engaging curriculum designed with a scope and sequence that teachers can easily adapt, and supported by student resources that encourage young learners to instantly apply phonics concepts to their reading and writing. The authors are available for onsite PD at your school!

Carolyn Banuelos Danielle James Elise Lund

Puzzle Piece Phonics Brings Word Study to the Balanced Literacy Classroom

TEACHER RESOURCESThe Teachers’ Resource Kit includes more than 100 unique puzzle pieces* for manipulation and display, an adorable full-color poster to help students match visuals to rhyming poems and concepts, and a Teacher’s Guide with lesson plans and learning activities. The Teacher’s Guide supports instruction of the phonics concepts and provides daily lessons that cover the core teaching components.

Research confirms that mastery of phonics concepts is critical to building the letter-sound knowledge students need to succeed as readers and writers. Put Puzzle Piece Phonics to work in your classrooms and discover how easy it is to make word study effective and fun.

*More than 150 puzzle pieces for second grade

STUDENT RESOURCESThe bright, kid-friendly pages of the Learner’s Notebook and Fluency Notebook give children plenty of room to practice and self-check their work. Students are introduced to specific sound-letter patterns through colorful puzzle pieces, then apply the patterns as they read and write both studied and new words.

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Kindergarten

First Grade

First Grade Teachers’ Resource Kit shown

Second Grade


The full-color Teacher’s Guide makes it easy for teachers to achieve Word Study in the Balanced Literacy classroom

The Teacher’s Guide streamlines the instructional routines that are the cornerstone of Puzzle Piece Phonics, and outlines simple directions for implementing the daily lessons. The practice routines ground the instruction in research and quickly become second nature to teachers and students.

Puzzle Piece Phonics spans approximately thirty-five weeks of instruction and is organized around the essential phonics concepts for each grade:

Kindergarten—Building the Sorting Routine; Letter Identification, Formation, and Sound; Short Vowels; Short A Word Families; Short E Word Families; Short I Word Families; Short O Word Families; Short U Word Families; Mixed Short Vowels; Short Vowels and Vowel_e

First Grade—Introduction to Word Study, Short Vowels, Digraphs, Blends, Controlled Vowels, Vowel_e, Vowel Teams, Open Syllables, Consonant Help Syllables, Irregular Vowels, and Long Vowel Review.

The Teacher’s Guide

DAILY ROUTINES FOR EACH WEEKDay 1 Routines

The Puzzle Piece Family: Completed on the first day of each new concept, this routine progresses through the major concepts of phonics. Each family is taught in successive weeks. The Big Reveal: A dynamic introduction to the puzzle pieces the students will study all week, including the name, sound, motion, and spelling of each puzzle piece.

Days 1-4 Routines (varies based on phonics focus)

Phonemic Awareness Puzzle Piece Review Supported Blending Blending Sight Words Dictation Quick Switch Sorting with Combined Picture

and Word Cards Sorting with Pictures Sorting with Separate Picture

and Word Cards Sorting with Words Practice Pieces Fluency

Day 5 RoutinesSpelling CheckComprehension CheckWord Hunt Fluency Celebration Weekly Celebration

Second Grade—Introduction to Word Study, Correctly Spelling Consonant Patterns, Correctly Spelling Long Vowels, Correctly Spelling Schwa and R-Controlled Vowels, Correctly Spelling Irregular Vowels, Parts of Speech, Prefixes and Suffixes, and Other Word Types

Each concept opens in the Teacher’s Guide with a Preparing for Your Week section to plan weekly instruction. Tips for Management and Differentiation help teachers spin their lesson plans to meet the diverse needs of their students, and daily step-by-step instructions suggest ways to implement each routine.

This dynamic step-by-step process is repeated each week for each new set of letter-sounds. The Teacher’s Guide also includes connections to students’ Fluency Notebook and Learner’s Notebook practice, a guide for pacing the scope and sequence of the program, a week-by-week list of the sight words introduced, and a map that outlines the components of each puzzle piece and suggests how they should be displayed in the classroom.


This revolutionary new platform allows young students to see the connection between letters and sounds, and makes phonics come alive in a memorable way. Children love using the puzzle pieces as they learn.

The large, bright, and sturdy puzzle pieces can be connected together to explore patterns and make words. After using them for focused study, the puzzle pieces are displayed on a classroom wall for reference and for year-long reinforcement of concepts.

Each puzzle piece shows an image of an object, the spelling of the word, and a color-coded sound pattern to help demonstrate the key rules of phonics to children. The color codes help students organize their understandings about what makes up a word.

The puzzle pieces become part of a classroom reference wall once they have been formally studied and prominently displayed for a week.

The puzzle pieces connect horizontally in Puzzle Piece Families.

The puzzle pieces connect vertically to other puzzle pieces that represent the same sound.

You can connect the puzzle pieces that represent vowel teams after teaching all of the vowel teams in Concept 7.

You can connect the puzzle pieces that represent long a when reviewing long a.

Color-Coded Puzzle Pieces Help Learners All Year Long!

How to Display the Puzzle Pieces

Pre-K Grade 1 Grade 2

red consonants consonants consonantsblue short vowels short vowels short vowels

orange digraphs digraphs digraphspurple blends blends blends

pink ------- controlled vowels

controlled vowels

green long vowels long vowels long vowels

teal ------- irregular vowels

irregular vowels

muted blue

short vowel families -------

muted orange silent letters

muted teal

parts of speech

warm neutral

sounds of –ed and –ing

cool neutral verb tenses

bright green prefixes

muted yellow suffixes

ocean green word types

maroon contractions

Beautiful, large puzzle pieces for each sound and spelling pattern make phonics concepts concrete for children.

Teachers introduce new puzzle pieces to students each week, and display the focus pieces prominently in the classroom. Each puzzle piece has a corresponding motion that helps students retain the sounds and spellings, and also gives teachers a way to quickly signal students.

The Puzzle Piece Families are taught in successive weeks to allow students to grasp all the concepts of phonics and apply prior learning. With each new concept/family taught, the teacher explicitly states to students that they are learning a new type of pattern. This explicitness helps students organize words into categories and use what they already know to tackle untaught patterns in new words.

Children study the focus puzzle pieces throughout the week, including handling them to build words. This fun and interactive use of the puzzle pieces engages their auditory, visual, tactile, and kinesthetic modes of learning. Working with the puzzle pieces is a memorable way to help students learn the major patterns of phonics.

At the end of the week of focused study, the puzzle pieces become part of an inspiring classroom reference wall that students can look to for review and reinforcement.

Teachers and students build words with the focus and supporting puzzle pieces during the week. This shows students how words are formed.

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The bright, colorful, kid-friendly pages of the Learner’s Notebook correspond to the phonics concepts for each grade and give young students plenty of room to practice their phonics skills during and after lessons. Great for independent work or take-home practice, each of the perforated, tear-out pages of the Learner’s Notebook engages students with language, including word sorts, comprehension checks, spelling practice, and more.

This is the place where students rehearse phonics patterns, build their vocabularies, practice breaking words into syllables, and apply knowledge of word structure to decode and encode words. Young children can self-check their work so that they—and their teachers—know where they are in developing their understanding of focus patterns.

Best of all, Learner’s Notebooks encourage students to have fun with language. Their excitement grows as they understand more and more of what they encounter in print.

Learner’s Notebooks grow student excitement as they

practice their burgeoning skills

312 pages

400 pages

352 pages

Fluency Notebooks reinforce concepts in a way that delights young readers

Fluency Notebooks reinforce phonics concepts for each grade and provide students with one easy-to-access resource that they can go to again and again throughout the year to practice reading and fluency skills.

Designed to be used for choral readings and independent fluency practice, The Kindergarten Fluency Notebook includes chants, couplets, passages, and poems accompanied by whimsical, brightly colored images that that support learners as they match picture to text.

The First Grade Fluency Notebook, also designed for choral readings and independent fluency practice, collects 140 poems with beautiful, full-color illustrations in the margins of each stanza so students can match picture-to-text.

The Second Grade Fluency Notebook contains “Reader’s Theater” stories that feature narrators and a cast of characters that kids will love bringing to life and provides built-in differentiation to support all students. Each story is designed to be used as the basis of reading and small-group fluency practice.

80 pages

76 pages

112 pages


A gorgeous 33” x 24” full-color poster for each grade level features poems by the award-winning poet Rebecca Kai Dotlich, together with darling illustrations to engage young readers.

The stanzas of each poem invite students to identify and practice the important letter-sound concepts learned in Kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grades, making phonics fun for young students, and reinforcing concepts. The adorable illustrations bring the poems to colorful life, and encourage fluency practice and discussion.

Word Explorer’s posters invite fluency and reinforce concepts

Second Grade

Kindergarten

First Grade

Grounded in extensive research, this engaging, colorful, and comprehensive year-long program helps K–2 learners at all levels build the letter-sound knowledge needed for success as readers and writers.

BECAUSE ALLTEACHERS ARE LEADERS

Word Study for the Balanced Literacy Classroom

Piece-by-piece phonics success for every student.

Complete First Grade set shown.Also available in Kindergarten and Second Grade.

word study for the balanced fr literacy...

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