How to Choose a Phonics Program for Elementary Schools

Most reading programs now call themselves phonics-based or aligned with the science of reading. A sales deck won't tell you whether that holds up. If you're on a K–2 team choosing a phonics program for an elementary school, you can check most of it yourself with a sample lesson and a list of questions for the vendor.

Phonics programs do different jobs, so judge each one against the job you need done.

• A core (Tier 1) program is the main foundational skills instruction every student gets. It needs a complete scope and sequence and teacher-led lessons with built-in assessments.
• A supplemental program fills a gap in your core program, such as daily decoding practice. Its sequence should line up with your core program’s.
• An intervention program serves students who are behind, in small groups or one-on-one (Tier 2 or 3). It needs placement tests and more frequent progress checks.

A good supplemental tool can make a poor core program, and the reverse, so decide which one you're buying before you compare.

The What Works Clearinghouse practice guide on foundational reading skills rates the evidence as strong for two recommendations: teach students to hear the sounds in spoken words and link them to letters, and teach them to decode words, analyze word parts, and write and recognize words. A program puts those into practice through its scope and sequence, the exact order in which it teaches sounds and spelling patterns.

• Can the vendor show you the full sequence, sound by sound, before you buy? If not, assume the order isn’t fixed.
• Does it start with a small set of sounds that make many words, so students read real words within the first few lessons?
• Do later lessons review each new skill, or does the program teach it once and move on?
• Does it move from sounds to words to sentences, with spelling practice alongside reading?

The same guide recommends, with moderate evidence, that each student read connected text every day. For beginners, that text should be decodable: built only from sound-spelling patterns the student has already learned, so they can work out each word instead of guessing. Open a lesson from the middle of the program and read the sentences it gives students.

In leveled or predictable books, students lean on repeated sentence patterns and pictures to guess words they can't yet decode.

The Reading League recommends checking a program for practices that conflict with the research before you look at what it does well. Its Curriculum Evaluation Guidelines list these red flags for word recognition:

• Teaching three-cueing as a decoding strategy: telling students to use the picture, the context, or the first letter to work out a word.
• Having students memorize whole words, including high-frequency words, without connecting their letters to sounds. Our post on phonics vs. sight words covers the research.
• No systematic scope and sequence, or no planned practice and review.
• Leveled or predictable texts for beginning readers in place of decodable ones.

EdReports, a nonprofit that publishes free reviews of instructional materials, changed its K–2 foundational skills reviews in 2024 and now flags materials that teach three-cueing for decoding.

Ask the vendor to show you the teacher view with real student data in it, and check it against these questions:

• Does it show progress for each student, or class totals like average scores and minutes used?
• Can you see which sounds or patterns a student hasn’t mastered, so you know what to reteach?
• Does a student show mastery by tapping the right answer or by reading the word aloud? Those are different skills.
• Can you see when each student last practiced?

Before you commit, find out what the program costs in teacher time:

• The minutes it needs each day, and whether that fits your literacy block.
• The training teachers need before the first lesson, and after it.
• The prep time for each lesson.
• Whether students can use it on their own while you teach a small group.

For a digital program, also ask:

• Can a kindergartner sign in without an adult’s help?
• Does it run on the devices and browsers your school already has?
• If students read aloud to it, will they need headsets with microphones? Classrooms are noisy, and speech recognition built for adult voices can misjudge young children.

Reading software can collect data about young children, including recordings of their voices. Before you sign, ask the vendor:

• What do you store about each student, and for how long?
• Do you keep voice recordings? Does any company you work with use them to train its models?
• Who at your company and at our school can see a student’s data?
• How do you delete a student’s data when they leave?
• Will you sign our district’s data privacy agreement?

Under FERPA's “school official” exception, your school can share student records with a vendor without parental consent if the vendor does work your own staff would do, stays under your school's direct control in how it uses and keeps the records, and follows FERPA's limits on using and passing them on. Your district can put that control in writing with a data privacy agreement. The Student Data Privacy Consortium publishes a standard one, the National Data Privacy Agreement, which thousands of districts have signed with their vendors.

Our student data privacy page shows the kind of answers to expect.

• EdReports publishes free reviews of K–2 reading materials, including foundational skills programs.
• Your team can run its own review with The Reading League’s Curriculum Evaluation Guidelines.
• The What Works Clearinghouse practice guide explains the research behind each recommendation and how strong the evidence is.
• Some states publish lists of approved reading materials. Check with your state education agency.

Before you roll a program out across a grade or a school, have a few teachers pilot it with their students for several weeks.

We built Ready, Set, Reading! to supplement classroom instruction with independent read-aloud practice. It teaches 48 sounds in a fixed sequence across 75 lessons, and students read every sound, word, and sentence aloud while speech recognition checks each attempt. The Teacher Plan covers up to 36 students, and the teacher dashboard shows how far each student has gotten in each lesson and when they last practiced.

You can see the full scope and sequence on our curriculum page and read about classroom use on the schools page.