Please note that enhancements to Functional Phonics+Morphology are anticipated for the 2025-2026 academic year.
Functional Phonics+Morphology
- Provides explicit, systematic, and sequential teaching of foundational phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and morphology at multiple levels.
- Has a flexible scope and sequence of evidence-based instructional practices built in a progression from simple to complex.
- Students will grow their meaning-making, word reading, and spelling skills through daily instruction and practice.
Products
- Digital lesson slides
- Teacher manuals (available in print and PDF format)
- Student workbooks (available in print and PDF format)
- Formative assessments and digital data tracker
- Classroom kits including student and classroom resources
- Assessment manuals (available in print and PDF format)
- Student materials (available in print and PDF format)
- School-to-Home connections (available in English, Hmong, Russian, Somali, and Spanish)
- Training materials including a video library of lesson components
To explore and purchase products for your district, visit our website.
Services
- Robust curriculum trainings
- Implementation support and consulting
- Coaching of the Coaches
For more training and coaching options, visit our website.
Hear from our community
FAQs
The Functional Phonics+Morphology K-5 Foundational Skills Program aligns with common core literacy standards, ensuring it supports grade-level expectations and literacy goals. The program has been identified as a "Highly aligned" curriculum on the Minnesota READ ACT approved curriculum list. According to the Reading League Curriculum Reviewer Workbook, the program meets all non-negotiable criteria, providing a comprehensive and effective approach to foundational skills.The program has demonstrated exceptional performance in improving student literacy outcomes. Self-reported reviews from EdReports highlight the program's strengths across various grade levels.
The Functional Phonics+Morphology program is a comprehensive foundational skills curriculum aligned with structured literacy practices. All Functional Phonics+Morphology users receive digital access to both the Phonics (K-2) and Morphology (3-5) curricular resources. Program resources include digital access to fully prepared and animated instructional slide decks including teacher instructional notes. Teacher guides and student workbooks are available in both print and PDF format. Digital resources include assessment manuals, data based decision making protocol, training video libraries and more. Additional resources available to support learner engagement include home-school connections and independent practice pages that coincide with all K-5 lessons, and supplementary print classroom resources are available for purchase.
Functional Phonics+Morphology is a K-5 comprehensive foundational skills curriculum aligned with structured literacy practices that progresses from simple to complex focusing on building students' word reading and spelling skills over time, gradually introducing more complex spelling-sound correspondences and morphological concepts. Key features include systematic and explicit instruction, cumulative practice, high interaction and engagement and evidence based routines.
- Systematic Instruction: The program provides a scope and sequence of systematic phonics and morphology foundational skills that increase in complexity and support students at multiple levels of instruction.
- Explicit Instruction: Students are explicitly taught phonics and morphology skills, including sounds (phonemes), letter-sound relationships, syllable patterns, units of meaning (morphemes), and vocabulary. The activities throughout the lessons ensure students connect phoneme-grapheme correspondences to word reading and provides many opportunities for practice using decodable texts. Students build automatically at the word level and focus on building prosody at the text level. The gradual release of responsibility ensures students have ample opportunities to practice correctly before being released to read and practice independently.
- Cumulative Practice: Ongoing review and cumulative practice to reinforce learning and provide opportunities for students to build fluency.
- High Interaction and Engagement: High levels of student-teacher interaction to ensure engagement and understanding.
- Evidence-Based Instructional Routines: The program consists of evidence-based instructional routines and techniques, supported by research and proven to support students at all levels.
This program is designed to be paired with a knowledge building curriculum that builds language comprehension skills for students as a part of a comprehensive model of reading and writing success.
The Functional Phonics+Morphology lessons consist of structured literacy practices and evidence-based instructional routines and techniques. Each 5-day instructional lesson includes hands-on, engaging, and multimodal activities aimed at pairing listening, speaking, reading, and writing to foster strong word recognition skills. The curriculum offers a scope and sequence progressing from simple to complex phonics and morphology skills, allowing teachers to target student needs using data-driven decision-making. Skill development focuses on building students' word reading and spelling skills over time, gradually introducing more complex spelling-sound correspondences and morphological understanding.
K-2: Functional Phonics: Early (Typical Kindergarten), Basic (Typical 1st Grade) and Advanced (Typical 2nd Grade) Levels
The Functional Phonics program is designed for use in grades K-2 as a whole group Tier 1 program. It can also be used in Tier 2 and small group settings, other grades, and support settings as needed. This program is designed to be taught alongside a knowledge building curriculum that focuses on building language comprehension skills in order to build a complete English Language Arts (ELA) instructional block.
Each unit consists of weekly lessons that are broken down into a 5-day aimed at instructing students in the foundational building block of the relationship between letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes), allowing them to read (decode) new words, build reading fluency, and spell (encode). Developing a strong foundation for independent reading enables all children to break down words into their individual sounds and blend them together to form words, ultimately enhancing comprehension and spelling skills.
3-5: Functional Morphology: Series 1 - Foundational Morphology, Series 2 - Latin, Series 3 - Greek
The Functional Morphology program has been designed to apply insights, routines, and approaches from Functional Phonics into instructional materials for older learners. Functional Morphology builds upon the Functional Phonics curriculum and is designed for grades 3-5. Similarly to Functional Phonics, this curriculum can be utilized in other grades and settings as needed. It is also intended to be paired with a knowledge building curriculum to support comprehensive ELA instruction.
Instruction in morphology can support students’ ability to decode, deepen their vocabulary understanding, and make meaning of text. Morphology is a powerful tool for improving spelling, decreasing cognitive load, and unlocking meanings rather than simply decoding sounds; this is especially important for readers working with multisyllabic words. Rather than activities always having a clear correct or incorrect answer, students will be asked to use their newly gained morphemic knowledge to explore word meanings and the use of words in context.
In Functional Morphology, over a five-day lesson, students will grow their word reading, spelling, and meaning-making skills through daily instruction and practice. Rather than instruction building from simple to complex as in the Functional Phonics scope and sequence, morphology instruction is built based on the common layers of language making up English (Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Greek), disciplinary vocabulary, and reviewing and consolidating past skills.
Functional Phonics+ Morphology has an assortment of supplemental materials and support available for purchase. Articulation cards and sound symbol correspondence cards available in the Getting Started Package. There are student resources available in the Classroom Kit including student name plates and table tents. Additional supports include initial and follow up training, deepening understanding topic training and coaching support. These resources are available for purchase on the Functional Phonics+Morphology website.
Functional Phonics+Morphology is currently being implemented in more than 50 districts, ~180 schools, and by more than 4,250 individual users. This includes more than 40 districts in Minnesota, as well as districts in Michigan, California, and Arizona.