Emerge! in Your Classroom

The Emerge! instructional model takes an explicit, systematic approach to teaching foundational skills, comprehension and knowledge building, and writing about texts and topics—cohesively connecting the strands needed for skilled reading and writing.

The K–1 Instructional Model

For K–1 classrooms, Emerge! guides students and teachers through 12 three-week long units. Each strand draws on research-based routines and a gradual release framework to transform leading literacy research into actionable practices.

Foundational Skills

(45–50 minutes)

Foundational skills are critical to building lifelong literacy; without them, complex learning cannot take place. With instruction and time, these skills become increasingly automatic, working in tandem to help students grow into skilled, fluent readers and writers.

Our goal is to make teaching foundational skills as easy and efficient as possible with explicit, systematic, cumulative instruction—a proven strategy for helping students acquire foundational knowledge. As such, our instruction centers on a clear, consistent set of routines that follow a gradual release process to slowly transition students toward independent practice:

1. Model Routines

Students receive targeted and explicit modeling  from a variety of phoneme awareness, decoding, encoding, and high-frequency word routines.
1. Model Routines
2. Guide Practice

Guided instruction and immediate corrective feedback from the teacher support students as they develop their skills and move toward independent practice.
2. Guide Practice
3. Move Toward Automaticity

Students move toward automaticity, transferring what they’ve learned from isolated word reading to connected texts.
3. Move Toward Automaticity