District 99 is shifting to a structured literacy approach to foundational reading instruction to better meet the needs of all of our learners. This model explicitly teaches systematic word-recognition and decoding strategies and include the following components:

Phonology, Sound-Symbol Association, Syllables, Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics.

These are beneficial for all students, including multilingual learners and those who have identified reading challenges.

Beyond foundational skills, our reading instruction works to improve students' background knowledge, vocabulary, and verbal reasoning abilities as well as their knowledge of language structures and literacy familiarity.