The iPad is already a staple in many primary classrooms, but its full impact on early literacy comes to life when it actively supports both instruction and ongoing assessment. 

With early literacy assessment solutions available as iPad apps, teachers can move beyond static, one-time evaluations, and instead capture, track, and respond to student learning in real time. 

By using built-in iPad features intentionally with these apps, student assessment becomes embedded in daily instruction. 

This article explores iPad in Education, for early literacy assessment and instruction.

If you use iPads in your school or are looking to acquire them in the future, here are key features to make the most of their impact in the classroom in early literacy. 

How Early Literacy Teachers Can Use iPad Features 

In early literacy, iPad is more than just a classroom device. 

It has the potential to become a powerful tool for assessment, progress monitoring, and early literacy instruction. 

Teachers can seamlessly capture learning, analyze progress, and guide instruction within the natural flow of teaching.

Are you currently using any of the following features of iPad in your classroom?

Multimedia Capture of Real-Time Literacy Skills

iPad features a high-resolution camera system with advanced sensors that support sharp photos, improved low-light performance, and smart HDR for balanced lighting and detail. 

Its video capabilities include recording in up to 4K resolution and enhanced audio capture for smooth, high-quality footage.

Sprig Reading allows teachers to capture video, audio, and photo evidence of student reading directly on the iPad. This makes it possible to:

• Document visual progress for students across foundational skills over time, adding to their ongoing digital student profile.
• Share meaningful insights with the literacy team and caregivers. Such as an educator sending audio/video of student work to literacy interventionists for review. Or a literacy coach demonstrating the correcting application of an instruction technique via AV.
• Revisit student performance to inform instruction and intervention.

Teachers can also scan worksheets or writing samples, adding depth to each student’s literacy profile and supporting more accurate assessment. 

Mobility for Flexible Classroom Instruction

An obvious feature, but the portability of iPad allows teachers to assess and instruct anywhere. In a classroom environment, this supports:

• Flexible small-group instruction.
• Real-time assessment during whole classroom activities.
• Seamless movement between students.

This mobility enables teaching to happen in the moment, wherever learning is taking place in the classroom. 

For example, with Sprig Reading on iPad, teachers can make progress monitoring assessments with small groups of students at their desk, individually with students, or even when engaged in whole class instruction.

Touch and Gesture-Based Interaction for Intuitive Teaching

iPad’s intuitive design supports efficient, uninterrupted instruction. When using Sprig Reading, teachers can:

• Quickly navigate between student profiles and assessments.
• Tap to record observations and select specific literacy skills.
• Access aligned activities and resources instantly.

This ensures assessment is fully integrated into teaching, rather than treated as a separate task. 

It also allows teachers to pair their explicit instruction with engaging activities and resources to practice and reinforce the taught concepts.

Stylus and Input Devices for Precision and Engagement

Using an iPad stylus enhances both teaching and assessment. Teachers can:

• Write and annotate directly on the screen.
• Draw attention to certain elements on the screen, when instructing or assessing students.

This helps bridge the gap between traditional paper-based learning and digital instruction, making student learning more participative and visible. 

Offline Access for Uninterrupted Teaching

Offline functionality ensures learning continues regardless of connectivity. By downloading Sprig Reading on the device, for example, teachers can:

• Access student data without internet access.
• Conduct assessments in any environment.
• Sync data later when reconnected with the school’s network.

This ensures assessment and instruction remain consistent even in low-connectivity or unpredictable environments.

Split View and Multitasking for Teaching and Assessing Together

With Split View, teachers can use Sprig Reading alongside lesson materials to:

• Teach and assess at the same time.
• Reference lesson plans while recording observations.
• Adjust instruction immediately based on student responses.

This is especially valuable for small group instruction and guided reading sessions, where lesson plans or reading text may have to be referred to or adjusted on the spot.

Notifications and Reminders for Consistent Progress Monitoring

iPad has a built-in Reminders app that allows you to create tasks and set alerts. Consistent tracking is essential in early literacy. Reminders and alerts help teachers:

• Conduct regular checks on key phonics and reading skills.
• Ensure no student or skill is overlooked.
• Stay organized in fast-paced classroom environments.

This supports sustained, consistent assessment practices so student progress is monitored continuously rather than intermittently.

Focus Modes for Accurate Assessment

iPad Focus mode reduces distractions by allowing you to customize notifications, home screens, and app usage based on your current activity. 

Focus modes help create a distraction-free environment, allowing early literacy teachers to:

• Gather more precise insights into student performance.
• Support student attention during reading tasks.
• Maintain structured assessment conditions.

This improves the reliability of assessment by ensuring student performance reflects true understanding.

Security and Privacy for Student Data Protection

The iPad provides a secure environment for managing student information. It includes features like secure access via FACE or touch ID, app tracking transparency, etc. This ensures:

• Student data is protected.
• Information remains confidential.
• Schools meet privacy and compliance expectations.

This creates trust in digital assessment systems while ensuring sensitive student information remains safeguarded at all times. 

Sprig Learning takes student data privacy seriously with its own protocols in place, so when software security is combined with device security, it creates the safest environment for both students and their teachers. 

How iPad Supports Students Directly

While the aforementioned features are designed to support teachers, they also enhance student learning where instruction and assessment involves students engaging with iPad. Pictured above is Sprig Explorers, a game-based early math assessment that uses iPads to engage learners in interactive play.  

iPad’s interactive, touch-based design allows students to directly engage with sounds and letters, supporting kinesthetic learning and making early literacy concepts more concrete and engaging.

Accessibility Features for Inclusive Literacy Instruction

A major advantage of iPad in education is accessibility. iPad supports inclusive teaching with features such as:

• AssistiveTouch for motor support. It allows users to replace physical buttons and gestures with a customizable virtual menu.
• Switch Control for diverse learners. It enables users to interact with iPad by activating a switch, such as pressing an external adaptive button, performing a head movement, or making a voiced or voiceless sound. 
• Closed captions for multimedia content. iPad usually shows standard subtitles and captions, but you can also choose special accessible captions,such as subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing, if available. 

These tools ensure all students can participate meaningfully in literacy instruction and assessment.

Text-to-Speech for Reading Support

Text-to-speech is a powerful tool for early readers, where iPad can read out loud anything on the screen or that is typed. It helps:

• Support visually challenged students.
• Reinforce pronunciation and word recognition.
• Support comprehension during independent work.

This feature builds independence and confidence, especially for students who are still developing foundational reading skills.

Speech Recognition for Oral Language Development

Speech recognition allows students to respond verbally, which is critical in early literacy. It enables teachers to:

• Capture oral reading fluency.
• Strengthen connections between spoken language and reading.

This supports a more complete picture of student literacy development by valuing oral language as part of reading progress.

Bringing It All Together. Optimizing iPad for Schools.

When iPad is used intentionally in education, tools like Sprig Reading transform the device into a real-time instructional partner. 

Teachers can integrate assessment into everyday instruction, respond immediately to student needs, and build a complete picture of progress across all foundational reading skills.

The result is a more efficient, data-informed, and impactful approach to early literacy instruction, one where every student is supported.

Welcome to the final instalment of the UFLI Digital Progress Monitoring Blog Series, which explores how progress monitoring data can be leveraged beyond the classroom.

Part 1 of this series focused on digital progress monitoring, describing the necessity of capturing and acting on sizeable amounts of  data generated by evidence-based curricula like UFLI Foundations.

Part 2 examined how aligning resources and activities to UFLI’s scope and sequence further strengthens instructional planning.

In Part 3, the focus of this blog shifts to what happens when student data is used to generate system-level insights for principals and school district leaders through granular roll-up reporting.

Insights Beyond the Classroom

When progress monitoring is implemented effectively within UFLI Foundations, it produces detailed, skill-level data at the classroom level.

But its full value is realized when that data is digitized, aggregated and analyzed across levels:

• Classroom level:  Focused on individual student progress and skill progression, this level is most actionable for a team of educators, literacy supports and school leaders who help target instruction and support for a particular group of students.

Example: A teacher notices several students are struggling with a specific phonics pattern in UFLI Foundations and forms a small group for additional practice before moving on.

• School level: By revealing patterns across multiple classrooms and grade levels, this level supports school leaders in identifying trends, ensuring instructional consistency, and directing resources where they are most needed.

Example: A principal sees that multiple Grade 1 classrooms are showing gaps in the same skill and organizes targeted professional development or specialized literacy supports  to address it.

• District level: Offering a view of system-wide trends and outcomes, this level enables district leaders to make strategic decisions around curriculum implementation, resource allocation, and long-term literacy planning.

Example: A school district identifies that several schools are consistently underperforming in early decoding skills and allocates additional literacy specialists or intervention programs to those sites.

What The Layered View Entails

This layered view enables leaders to move beyond isolated snapshots and toward a cohesive understanding of literacy development across their system.

With access to roll-up reporting, principals and superintendents can:

1. Monitor literacy progress across multiple classrooms and schools.
2. Identify trends in skill mastery, gaps, and growth over time.
3. Target instructional support, staffing, and resources where they are needed most.

Instead of relying solely on periodic assessments, leaders gain access to continuous, evidence-based insights.

This transforms classroom-level data into actionable system-level intelligence, supporting more strategic and timely decision-making.

Maximizing the Value of Existing Literacy Investments

UFLI Foundations and the UFLI Foundations manual are the property of the University of Florida Literacy Institute©. All rights reserved.

Schools and districts have already made significant investments in high-quality, evidence-based literacy programs like UFLI Foundations.

These programs provide structured, explicit instruction grounded in research.

However, without consistent and comprehensive digital progress monitoring, it can be difficult to fully understand:

• How effectively the program is being implemented?
• Which skills students are mastering? In which classrooms? In what schools?
• Where additional supports are required?

Combining Digital Progress Monitoring with Granular Roll-up Reporting

By layering in digital progress monitoring with granular reporting, school leaders can do the following:

• Amplify the impact of existing literacy programs by ensuring that every skill taught within structured curricula like UFLI Foundations is consistently monitored, reinforced, and supported across classrooms. This creates alignment between what is taught and what is learned.

• Ensure instruction is guided by clear, ongoing evidence of student learning, allowing educators and leaders to move from assumptions to precise, data-informed decisions about pacing, grouping, and intervention.

• Gain visibility into instructional effectiveness, not just student performance, helping leaders identify where implementation is strong, where variability exists, and where additional support or coaching may be needed.

• Track progress over time at both the student and system level, making it possible to measure growth, evaluate impact, and adjust strategies proactively rather than reactively.

 The result is a stronger return on investment, not only in terms of maximizing the value of instructional resources, but in driving measurable gains in student achievement and supporting long-term literacy success across classrooms, schools, and districts.

Supporting Targeted On-Demand Professional Development

Professional learning must be based on evidence-based practices, such as teaching all the foundational reading skills. 

It should also be updated based on the latest research on what works in early literacy.

Granular roll-up reporting plays a critical role in shaping effective, targeted professional development. 

Rather than relying on broad, one-size-fits-all training, leaders can use data insights to pinpoint specific skill gaps across classrooms, identify instructional practices that need reinforcement, and surface variability in implementation across schools or grade levels.

This allows for professional learning that is:

• Focused on real classroom needs.
• Timely based on current data.
• Actionable with clear next steps for educators.

For example, if data shows widespread difficulty with a particular phonics pattern or skill, professional development can be designed to 1) revisit instructional routines, 2) model effective teaching strategies, and 3) provide aligned resources and practice opportunities.

In this way, progress monitoring data becomes not just a tool for tracking students, but a driver of educator growth and instructional consistency.

Complete UFLI Progress Monitoring Through Multiple Alignments

When digital progress monitoring systems created to align with UFLI’s scope and sequence, instructional resources & activities and granular reporting work together, data becomes part of everyday teaching and decision-making.

At the leadership level, this creates alignment between:

1) Curriculum 2) Instruction 3) Assessment 4) Intervention

Such an alignment ensures that every child receives the support they need to become a confident, capable reader.

Granular roll-up reporting makes this possible by connecting what happens in individual classrooms to the broader system, turning data into action, and action into improved literacy outcomes.

Educators are no longer relying on infrequent checkpoints. Instead, they can use real-time, skill-level insights to guide instruction at every level:

• Whole-class instruction: adjusting pacing and focus based on class-wide trends.
• Small group teaching:  grouping students by specific skill needs.
• Individual intervention: targeting precise gaps with confidence.

Moreover, this information can be tracked for every student as they move through the education system, building a continuous historical record that helps evaluate progress and set goals for student cohorts over time. 

While teachers focus on the needs of their current students, administrators use this longitudinal data to monitor cohort-wide trends and inform planning for both current and future cohorts.

With Sprig Reading, student cohorts can be tracked and performance benchmarked through intuitive visuals at the classroom, school, and district levels.The latest research-backed professional learning videos covering all foundational reading skills are available directly within the tool.

Disclaimer

Curious to learn more about how Sprig aligns with evidence-based scope and sequences like UFLI, and how instruction can be tracked and differentiated at the educator level with supporting resources and activities? Read part 1 and part 2 of this UFLI Progress Monitoring Blog series, respectively.

Welcome to Part 2 of the UFLI Progress Monitoring Blog Series. In this instalment, we explore the critical role of classroom literacy resources and activities that align with the UFLI Foundations curriculum. 

In Part 1, we established the importance of digital progress monitoring and highlighted UFLI’s unique position as an evidence-based curriculum. 

When UFLI lessons and their associated reading skills  are systematically monitored, it generates a substantial volume of data– essential for informing assessment, guiding instruction, and supporting targeted intervention.

But data alone is not enough.

As part of effective instructional planning, teachers prioritize the use of evidence-based literacy resources and activities to ensure their teaching is both targeted and impactful.

This blog examines how aligning these elements to the UFLI Foundations curriculum enhances their impact. 

It also explores how thoughtfully designed resources and activities can complement existing UFLI materials, strengthen instructional delivery, and improve student learning outcomes.

Finally, this blog sets the stage for the concluding part of the series, where we will bring together data, resources, and instructional decision-making into a cohesive approach to literacy success.

Resources That Are Aligned to The UFLI Curriculum

Instructional resources are the materials teachers rely on to deliver, reinforce, and extend learning. 

There can be many types of resources such as printable worksheets, cards, manipulatives, charts, workbooks, etc.

Resources signify something more than simply printing worksheets. They are meant to be used intentionally, with off-screen, multisensory approaches that actively engage students.

Through movement, sound, and hands-on interaction, they help strengthen the brain pathways needed for reading development.

When aligned to the UFLI scope and sequence, resources become far more than supplemental teaching aids. They become intentional supports designed to teach specific foundational reading skills.

Aligned resources help ensure that students are consistently exposed to the same concepts being taught.

They also allow for practice opportunities that directly reinforce targeted foundational skills.

For example, if a lesson focuses on a specific phonics skill, aligned resources might include:

• Decodable texts that emphasize the targeted skill.
• Visual aids such as anchor charts tied to the skill.
• Worksheets that enable practice of the taught concept.

Without alignment to a research-based scope and sequence, even high-quality resources can create disconnects. 

Students may practice skills that are either too advanced, not yet introduced, or unrelated to the current focus, reducing the effectiveness of both instruction and assessment.

Aligned resources ensure that every interaction with text or task is purposeful and connected to the intended learning goals.

Activities That Are Aligned to The UFLI Curriculum

While resources provide the “what,” classroom activities define the “how.” 

They shape how students engage with foundational reading skills during instruction.

Activities can be used in whole-class, small-group, or individualized instruction settings. They can also be personalized based on student assessment data, ensuring each learner gets the right instruction, at the right time, at the right level. 

Effective literacy activities aligned to UFLI are:

• Systematic: following a logical progression.
• Focused: targeting specific foundational skills.
• Efficient: allowing for quick checks of understanding.

These activities create opportunities for embedded progress monitoring, where teachers can observe skill master over time, and see the transfer of those skills to new words and passages.

For example, for lessons focusing on phonological awareness, aligned activities might include:

• Phoneme–grapheme mapping.
• Blending and segmenting routines.
• Clap syllables in the word with matching props. 

When activities are aligned, assessment becomes natural and continuous, rather than something separate or occasional. 

They serve a more primary role in planning instruction, in providing instructions on how to use an existing resource covered in the prior section, like printable worksheets or flashcards. 

Sprig Reading: A Digital Repository of Classroom Activities and Resources

Sprig Reading includes a growing set of embedded classroom resources and activities designed to support the teaching and assessment of foundational reading skills. 

These are accessible directly within the platform, allowing educators to move seamlessly from instruction to practice to observation without leaving their workflow!

Importantly, these resources and activities are not intended to replace the lesson resources found in the UFLI Foundations Toolbox or the instructional activities mentioned within the UFLI Virtual Teaching Resource Hub.

Instead, they are designed to complement them through 1) Intentional Mapping, 2) Greater Choices, 3) Flexibility of Materials, 4) Availability of Added Guidance, and 5) Ability to Create and Share.

1. Intentional Mapping of Materials to UFLI’s Scope and Sequence

With Sprig Reading, teachers have an inventory of evidence-based resources and activities at their fingertips. As they work through UFLI lesson by lesson, aligned resources and activities are already built into the platform. 

There is no need to spend time searching for them or second-guess alignment. Everything is intentionally mapped and ready to use when needed.

2. Greater Choices of Materials Designed for Classroom Use

With its continually expanding library of engaging resources and activities, Sprig Reading gives UFLI teachers even more ways to provide meaningful practice across every foundational reading skill.

The resources are all original, downloadable and printable, designed for classroom use and the instruction and assessment of foundational reading skills. 

3. Flexibility of Materials for Greater Utility

Sprig Reading contains many flexible activities which can serve the dual purpose for quick skill checks or reinforcing a taught concept. 

This allows for teachers to exercise their judgment in how they want to use a certain activity that best serves the unique needs of an individual student, or groups of students.

4. Availability of Added Guidance for More Support

Additionally, the reading skills are paired with instructional and assessment guidance, which provide more context on how to use the resource, or apply the particular activity.

5. Ability to Create and Share

Sprig Reading provides the opportunity for teachers to share new activities they have developed and which have been proven to work well in their classrooms.  

Furthermore, teachers can choose to  share their activities with other teachers within their school district and/or with all teachers across the world that use Sprig Reading.

Bringing it All Together: Resources and Activities in A Digital Progress Monitoring Environment

All of this within a digital progress monitoring environment, where teachers can do all of their work in one place when digitally monitoring progress of every skill in UFLI’s scope and sequence. 

By working alongside UFLI’s existing resources, Sprig Reading helps create a more connected instructional experience, where teaching, practice, and visibility into student learning are closely aligned and monitored!

Furthermore, Sprig Reading is designed to personalize instruction for every student. By analyzing UFLI assessment data over time, it recommends targeted activities and resources for students, whether that be in a  whole class, small group and/or individualized instruction setting.

Looking Ahead to the Final Alignment Picture

UFLI Foundations and the UFLI Foundations manual are the property of the University of Florida Literacy Institute©. All rights reserved.

It is powerful when teachers can digitally monitor student progress across all reading skills within the UFLI Foundations curriculum, ensuring that data is consistently captured and paired with aligned resources and instructional activities. 

This creates a more coherent and effective classroom experience, where instruction, practice, and assessment are tightly connected.

However, student and classroom-level insight is only one part of the picture.

For school and district leaders, there is tremendous opportunity in zooming out to view this data system-wide.

This includes identifying trends, evaluating instructional effectiveness, and making informed decisions about resource allocation and intervention strategies.

When progress monitoring data is aggregated across classrooms and schools, variability in instructional impact can be identified and cohorts requiring additional support can be prioritized.

At the district level, this same data enables leaders to allocate resources more strategically (for example, staffing, interventions, professional development). It also helps to evaluate the implementation and effectiveness of existing tools and policies. 

Research shows that data-driven decision-making in education is most effective when it operates as a continuous and iterative process, that is, collecting data, analyzing it, acting on insights, and evaluating outcomes over time.

In Part 3 of this series, the focus will shift to how school leaders can use progress monitoring data to inform instructional decisions at the school and district level.

Disclaimer

Welcome to Part 1 of the UFLI Progress Monitoring Blog Series, where the critical role of digital UFLI progress monitoring that aligns to the UFLI curriculum is explored.

The UFLI Foundations curriculum already maps to standards, such as the Common Core State Standards. It’s an evidence-based early learning resource.

It offers an explicit, systematic scope and sequence of lessons, along with built-in assessment, planning, and intervention resources.

But what about digitally tracking all the reading skills being taught, so they can be reviewed lesson by lesson, over time for every school, class and student?

To effectively implement UFLI progress monitoring, tracked reading skills are most effective when they are  captured digitally and aligned with the curriculum.

In this first article, we examine:

What makes UFLI so effective in supporting early literacy instruction? 

What opportunities emerge when tools can track data digitally and are created to align with UFLI’s scope and sequence? 

How can educators benefit when digital progress monitoring is designed specifically around that structure? 

Let’s begin by looking at the factors that led to the rise of UFLI as a trusted structured literacy program.

The Growing Importance of Structured Literacy and Data

Early reading success depends on two essential elements: systematic instruction and progress monitoring data. 

Research in the Science of Reading has consistently shown that students learn to read most effectively when foundational reading skills are taught explicitly and sequentially.

At the same time, educators increasingly recognize that strong instruction should be paired with timely, actionable data. 

Teachers need to understand how students are progressing through foundational reading skills so they can identify learning gaps early and provide appropriate support.

Without consistent progress monitoring, these questions are often answered only through periodic assessments and screeners, which may not capture the day-to-day development of early readers.

This growing need for structured literacy instruction has led many schools to adopt research-based programs such as UFLI Foundations. 

With its clear scope and sequence, it has been a game-changer for early literacy teachers!

UFLI Foundations: A Research-Based Literacy Framework with a Clear Scope and Sequence

UFLI Foundations and the UFLI Foundations manual are the property of the University of Florida Literacy Institute©. All rights reserved.

The UFLI Foundations program, developed by the University of Florida Literacy Institute, is widely recognized as a research-aligned approach to early literacy instruction.

With over 500,000 instructional manuals in classrooms spreading over every state and province in the U.S and Canada respectively, the UFLI Reading program is helping millions of children improve their reading skills. 

There are always new schools adopting it, many of them featured in Sprig Learning’s monthly newsletter. 

The UFLI Foundations curriculum includes 148 total lessons, including introductory, concept, and review lessons, that are to be covered from K-2. 

This structured progression allows teachers to move students through foundational reading skills in a deliberate and research-supported manner.

Because of its clarity and alignment with reading science, many schools rely on UFLI as a core instructional framework for early literacy.

Each UFLI lesson includes multiple reading skills, adding up to a total of 844 individual foundational skills and high-frequency words. 

Across every student over three years, this represents a significant volume of data!

What about monitoring the progress of such evidence-based instruction?

Even strong instructional programs can present challenges when it comes to tracking student learning across the full sequence of skills.

There is a need for digital tracking and being aligned to the curriculum!

Why Digital Tracking Matters for UFLI Progress Monitoring

In many classrooms, teachers currently track UFLI progress using paper assessments, observational notes, or spreadsheets. 

While these approaches can provide useful information, they often make it difficult to visualize progress over time and share critical, timely data across the entire literacy team.

It also struggles to give a clear ongoing view of skill mastery that follows each student from grade to grade throughout their reading journey. 

As a result, answering key instructional questions becomes more difficult:

• Which students have mastered the currently taught skills?
  
• Which students need additional support before moving forward?
• Are certain concepts proving challenging for certain students?

To answer these questions effectively, progress monitoring systems must digitally track student data over time while  ensuring a strong curricular alignment to the UFLI instructional framework.

Why Curricular Alignment Matters for UFLI Progress Monitoring

For digital progress monitoring to be effective, the skills that are tracked should align closely with the curriculum being taught. 

When assessment and monitoring systems are aligned with the UFLI scope and sequence, teachers can track student progress based on the exact skills being taught during instruction.

Without this alignment, educators may struggle to:

• Monitor mastery of specific phonics concepts.
• Track progress lesson by lesson.
  
• Understand how students are moving through the full sequence of foundational skills.

Supporting UFLI Progress Monitoring with Aligned Digital Tools

When progress monitoring tools are created to align with UFLI’s scope and sequence, teachers can track student learning more effectively and accurately.

As teachers move through UFLI lessons, they can monitor the development of foundational skills such as:

• Phoneme segmentation and blending.
• Grapheme–phoneme correspondence.
• Reading fluency in connected text.

Digital tools designed with strong curricular alignment allow teachers to record observations during daily instruction rather than relying solely on occasional assessments.

For example, digital monitoring systems can allow educators to:

• Document skill mastery for individual students.
• Record instructional observations quickly.
• Capture evidence of student learning.
• Share notes and strategies across an instructional team
•  Track trends across the classroom.

Sprig Reading supports this type of monitoring by aligning digital skill tracking with structured literacy instruction. Sprig Reading 4.0 was created to align with UFLI’s scope and sequence.

Teachers can document progress in the same sequence in which skills are taught, making UFLI progress monitoring more continuous and informative.

Importantly, teachers do not need to change their instructional approach.

Instead, aligned monitoring tools simply enhance the visibility of student learning within the existing instructional framework.

Supporting Timely and Targeted Literacy Interventions

One of the greatest benefits of effective UFLI progress monitoring is the ability to respond quickly to student needs for every lesson.

When teachers can see how students are progressing through the UFLI scope and sequence, they can identify challenges early and provide targeted support.

For example, educators may:

• Adjust whole-class instruction if a phonics concept proves difficult.
• Provide small-group reinforcement for decoding patterns.
• Deliver targeted intervention for individual students.

Rather than waiting weeks or months for formal assessments or screeners, teachers can make instructional adjustments based on the learning they observe during daily instruction.

When structured instruction, curricular alignment, and consistent progress monitoring work together, schools can create a responsive literacy environment where students receive the support they need at the right time.

Making Literacy Data Visible Across Instructional Teams

Early literacy instruction often involves collaboration among multiple educators.

Students may receive support from:

• Classroom teachers.
• Co-teachers.
• Early Childhood Educators.
• Literacy coaches.
• Reading specialists.
• Interventionists.

When UFLI progress monitoring data is stored digitally, this information can be shared securely across the instructional team.

Shared access to progress data allows educators to develop a common understanding of student needs, coordinate instruction, and plan targeted interventions more effectively.

This collaborative visibility strengthens curricular alignment across classrooms and grade levels, ensuring that all educators are working toward the same literacy goals.

Enabling Truly Data-Driven Literacy Instruction with Digital & Aligned UFLI Progress Monitoring

UFLI is designed to deliver systematic, research-based lessons that build foundational reading skills through explicit teaching and regular practice. 

Sprig Reading enables teachers using UFLI to continuously monitor student progress digitally, track skill development, and identify students who need additional support.

UFLI ensures high-quality instruction grounded in the science of reading, while Sprig Reading ensures that instruction is visible, measurable, and actionable in real classroom contexts over the whole early literacy journey for students.

Besides being aligned with UFLI’s scope and sequence when digitally tracking reading skills, are there other features that further enhance this alignment?

Classroom Lesson Resources & Activities will be covered in Part 2 of this UFLI Progress Monitoring Blog Series. Stay tuned!

Disclaimer

Mastering the foundational reading skills from Pre-K through Grade 3 is one of the strongest predictors of a student’s early literacy success.

A significant body of research now tells us not just what to teach, but how to teach it. 

We’ve explored both the ideal learning content and teaching activities before. We’ve also written on the different assessment types of the learned content.

In this blog, Sprig explores what evidence-based, systematic and explicit teaching practices look like in early literacy classrooms. It further explores how systems of support can better enable teachers to be more effective with those practices.

The best teaching practices in early literacy are evidence-based.

Evidence-Based Teaching Practice Defined

An evidence-based teaching practice is one that is supported by rigorous research showing it leads to improved student outcomes. 

Evidence-based practice combines teacher experience, classroom observation and decades of research to guide decisions.

As stated in the introduction, they have to be applied to the foundational reading skills.

Let’s see what they look like in modern classrooms. 

Core Evidence-Based Teaching Practices in Early Literacy

Below are research-validated classroom practices that support foundational reading skills:

1. Explicit Instruction

What it is: Teachers directly teach skills (e.g., phonics, phonemic awareness) rather than assuming students will pick them up indirectly. 

The instruction follows a research-based scope and sequence with clear modeling and guided practice.

Why it matters: Meta-analyses show explicit and systematic teaching of foundational skills improves decoding, fluency, and comprehension more effectively than less structured approaches.

Beginning readers do not yet have the neural pathways to infer phoneme-grapheme relationships. Explicit instruction forms efficient reading habits early on.

2. Systematic Instruction

What it is: Instruction progresses in a planned order, from easier to more complex skills.

For example, phonemic awareness precedes phonics, which precedes fluent decoding and comprehension.

Why it Matters: Systematic phonics instruction is significantly more effective than random or incidental approaches in building word-reading skills.

Students require multiple successful retrievals of a skill across contexts before mastery. 

Systematic instruction respects this skill dependency chain and ensures students know the required information to avoid costly interventions later on.

3. Modelling and Subsequent Guided & Independent Practice

What it is: Teachers show proficient strategies by thinking aloud, demonstrating decoding, comprehension strategies, or expressive reading. 

Shared reading involves reading together to scaffold learners’ skills. 

Why it Matters: Students learn not just what to do but how to do it by observing fluent readers in action.

After explicit modelling, students practice with teacher support (guided) and then independently. 

Practice includes decoding with feedback, reading decodable texts, and structured activities.

4. Feedback and Correction

What it is: Teachers provide timely, specific feedback when students make errors, helping them understand why an answer is incorrect and how to improve.

Sometimes this takes the form of very early reading interventions.

Why it Matters: Immediate corrective feedback strengthens phonemic awareness, decoding accuracy, and fluency, reducing the likelihood of persistent errors.

Practice alone without support doesn’t guarantee skill acquisition, feedback and correction during practice significantly boost learning.

5. Application in Context

What it is: Students apply skills in meaningful contexts, such as reading connected texts after decoding practice and engaging with comprehension strategies like predicting or summarizing.

Why it Matters: Application should reinforce skills learned, not replace explicit teaching with guess-based strategies (e.g., three cueing, which research has challenged due to weak evidence). 

Two common extremes to avoid are:

• Too isolated: Students practice skills endlessly without real reading

   

• Too contextual too soon: Students read texts before decoding skills are stable

Effective application strikes a balance.

6. Ongoing Assessment and Adaptation

What it is: Regular screening and progress monitoring help teachers tailor instruction to individual student needs. Assessments inform grouping, pacing, and targeted interventions.

Why it Matters: Reading development can be non-linear. Students can:

• Master phonics but struggle with phonemic awareness.

   

• Decode accurately but lack fluency.
• Comprehend orally but struggle with print.

Without regular and granular assessment, these patterns remain invisible.

Frameworks like Response to Intervention (RtI) or Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) embed data use into daily practice so teachers can respond to student performance quickly. 

7. Multi-Sensory Techniques (Where Appropriate)

What it is: Approaches like Orton-Gillingham use auditory, visual, and kinesthetic modalities simultaneously to teach and reinforce learning.

Why it Matters: Multi-sensory structured literacy professional learning programs like Brainspring’s Phonics First®, is particularly effective for students with reading difficulties and dyslexia, as it strengthens neural associations between sounds and symbols.

Thus it’s a more inclusive approach to give everyone the best chance at succeeding. 

How Can These Practices Be Supported With Tools?

The classroom practices above are powerful on their own, but certain assessment and instructional support systems help teachers implement them more efficiently and consistently.

The following capabilities in a teacher support system help with all the aforementioned best-in-class teaching practices in early literacy:

1. Systematic Scope and Sequence

Tools with built-in scope and sequence help teachers ensure instruction is logical, cumulative, and aligned with evidence-based progression.

Teachers can follow systematic approaches without reinventing the scope and sequence.

2. Planned Screening & Progress Monitoring

Planned yearly screening and regular monitoring in between help teachers differentiate instruction, group students strategically, and know exactly when to intensify support.

Teachers can see who needs extra support now rather than waiting for end-of-unit tests.

3. Data Visualization and Reporting

Easy-to-interpret dashboards give teachers and leaders a clear picture of skill acquisition across phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Clear dashboards allow teachers to form small groups, assign targeted practice, and monitor growth in real time.

4. In-Moment Feedback

Some tools capture notes, examples, and multimedia evidence linked directly to instruction, making feedback and planning more actionable and less time-consuming.

When teachers can take notes tied to instructional moments, feedback becomes more actionable.

A Smarter Way. Making it Super Easy To Implement The Best Teaching Practices.

Teachers are more likely to implement evidence-based teaching practices when they have tools that reduce workload and clarify next steps, reducing time spent on data entry and increasing time spent on instruction.

If you want a solution that supports explicit, systematic teaching, planning practice and application of master, and ongoing monitoring in one place, solutions like Sprig Reading can help! 

This is achieved by integrating assessment data, instructional planning, and progress visualization.

Teachers can spend more time on teaching and less on paperwork. 

Evidence-based early literacy is not a checklist. It is a way of thinking about instruction,  one that prioritizes clarity, sequence, responsiveness, and sustainability. 

When teaching practice aligns with how reading actually develops, student success follows.