Beginners 2 Overview

Beginners 2 Goals

These are the main goals of Beginners 2. You can download the Beginners 2 Paths to Fluency Tracker to help track students' progress towards these goals.

Phonics: Consonant Blends & Digraphs

Speaking: Basic Sentence Structures

Writing: Copying Sentences

Reading: Short Basic Sentences

Basic Vocabulary

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Beginners 2 Tips

1. Each unit at this level was designed for 1 week with about 3 hours of class time per week. If you have your students for less than 3 hours a week, you may want to consider doing a unit every two weeks. If the speaking is easy for your students and they are retaining the phonics well, you can probably speed up the pace.

2. The first 2 Units are Review of Beginners 1: If the review units are difficult, you may want to go back and grab some pages from beginners 1 and have students spend some more time reviewing before moving on.

3. Consonant Blends and Digraphs. These phonics combinations are a big focus of Beginners 2 and the words can be a mouthful for students. If they are struggling with their alphabet letter sounds or they struggle to read short-vowel (CVC) words, you will want to spend some more time there beforehand (or concurrently) to build up their fluency before throwing in the challenge of consonant blends and digraphs.

4. Train students to listen. If you are saying something the students have learned before, try to avoid using gestures. We often gesticulate without even thinking about it. Students can come to over-rely on their eyes for understanding rather than their ears. If they're struggling to understand, by all means, gesticulate away, but give them the chance to practice their listening beforehand by putting your hands behind your back and repeating yourself a couple of times.

5. Stronger Speakers. The speaking practices in Beginners 2 are generally be-verb type sentences which helps prepare them for Beginners 4 when they formally learn be-verbs. If you find that the speaking material is too easy but students need the phonics, then double down on the phonics and skip the speaking pages. You can have a time each class where students get together with a partner to talk about a particular topic instead. That said, even if students pick up the speaking practices quickly, it is still great vocabulary and sentence structure review for them.

6. If your students are older (Grades 5-12), they can handle (and probably require) a quicker pace. You can just pull the phonics word family lists from this level and pair them with a higher level's material, or you can pull the phonics word family lists and work through a few of them each class so that you make quick progress through the phonics the students need to learn.