Your cart is empty.
Visit the store to add items to your cart.
Children love learning and want to be successful. Getting things right at the start plays a huge part in their learning success.
If children start school with strong foundational skills, their learning journey will be easier and more successful. If they start school with gaps in their knowledge, it’s our job to fill them fast.
With a unique blend of discovery-based activities and systematic, explicit instruction, Key Foundations develops the essential skills children need to become successful readers and writers — all in ten minutes a day.
“Everything about Key Foundations makes sure that learning is fun, that developing language and phonological awareness is natural and cumulative, and that alphabet knowledge is learned easily and contextually.”
Discovery-based
In the same way that block and water play builds a platform for
understanding math and science concepts, the Key Foundations
activities help children discover how language works.
Systematic and explicit
In the same way that children learn to identify shapes and link them
to objects in their environment, they learn to recognize and name
letters and link them to the sounds in words.
Fast and effective
With a unique blend of discovery-based activities and systematic,
explicit instruction, Key Foundations develops the essential skills
children need to become successful readers and writers —
all in ten minutes a day.
Lesson 1
Sound Hunt
Students listen for the sound in children’s names, in the Alphabet Bops, and in familiar words, building their ability to recognise and pronounce an individual sound.
Lesson 2
Letter Hunt
Students learn to associate the sound with an alphabet letter and to recognise and form the uppercase and lowercase letters
Lesson 3
Word Games
Incorporates a variety of playful activities that build oral language, background knowledge, and phonological awareness skills.
Lesson 4
Sound Games
Students play with the sounds in words, developing the phonological and phonemic awareness needed for learning to read and write.
Each Key Foundations classroom kit includes an updated Lesson Book with 188 10-minute lessons. The updated Lesson Book has an expanded Teacher Support Materials section, including five assessment tools, two assessments with validity and reliability, and a new Supporting English Learners section with a sound transfers issues chart.
The downloadable resources support letter recognition and letter formation using a variety of activities in a developmentally appropriate way.
Included Resources:
Based on research and backed by evidence, the Key Foundations approach accelerates literacy achievement.
In The Shine Literacy Project, students’ school entry assessment results were correlated with their Word Identification skills and Comprehension skills after 18 months at school; to find out what school entry knowledge was predictive of later reading and spelling success.
Correlations can range from -1.0 to +1.0. In this project, correlations of around .50 or higher were considered to be reasonably strong predictors of subsequent reading and spelling performance. The strongest correlations were for phonological awareness (.658) and letter-sound and letter-name knowledge (. 581 - .609).
These predictors of literacy success led to the development of Key Foundations, an instructional resource that teaches phonological awareness , alphabet knowledge and letter-sound knowledge, alongside vocabulary and oral language skills.
| Variables at school entry | Variables after 18 months at school | |
| Comprehension | Word Identification | |
|---|---|---|
| Phonological knowledge | .658 | .603 |
| Letter-sound (lowercase) | .609 | .643 |
| Letter-name (uppercase) | .599 | .609 |
| Letter-sound (uppercase) | .587 | .615 |
| Letter-name (lowercase) | .581 | .616 |
| Sound-letter knowledge | .545 | .526 |
| Vocabulary | .495 | .439 |
| Word identification | .484 | .550 |
| Invented spelling | .472 | .469 |
Key Foundations makes it easy to engage young children and stimulate their curiosity and sense of achievement as they build the essential skills for learning to read and write.
