UFLI Foundations and The Secret Stories: A Perfect Pair

Secret Stories and UFLI…Two of my absolute favorite research-supported phonics resources that complement each other perfectly!

Hi, my name is Leah Ruesink! I am an early literacy coach and adjunct professor from Michigan, here to share my thoughts on two amazing phonics resources - Secret Stories and UFLI Foundations - AND to explain why they belong together in the classroom!

What’s all the buzz about UFLI Foundations?

As a literacy coach, I first heard about UFLI Foundations in a Facebook group (The Science of Reading - What I Should Have Learned in College). At the time, my district was using a phonics curriculum that just wasn’t meeting the needs of all students. The district was overwhelmed with the number of students in need of intervention support.

You cannot intervene your way out of core instruction that is not effective. - 
Michelle Elia

Ever since discovering UFLI Foundations, I’ve been digging deeper, spreading the word to the teachers I work with, and planning professional learning around this amazing resource.

• What is it? UFLI is an explicit and systematic phonics program receiving lots of attention from teachers and educators across the country. The lessons provide many opportunities for students to practice phonics skills with a gradual release of responsibility model. Teachers love the detailed lesson plans, free PowerPoint/Google Slides deck to accompany each lesson, and additional materials for center activities and extra practice.
• Who is it for? UFLI is intended for core instruction for students in Kindergarten–2nd grade and intervention for 3rd grade and up. It may be used for whole group Tier 1 instruction, small groups, Tier 2 and 3 instruction or all of the above!
• Why does it work? UFLI lessons are systematic, sequential, and explicit with lots of intentional interleaved practice. For example, if the short /i/ sound is introduced in a lesson, that skill is reviewed and practiced more than 300 times over the course of the next 10 lessons!

UFLI Foundations lessons follow this eight-step routine:

1. Phonemic awareness
2. Visual Drill
3. Auditory Drill
4. Blending Drill
5. New Concept
6. Word Work
7. Irregular Words
8. Connected Text

So…how does Secret Stories fit into UFLI lessons?

Secret Stories is a phonics supplement based on something all kids can connect with... stories! Though the “secrets” can be used with ANY program or curriculum, I think they are the puzzle piece necessary to complete the 30-minute UFLI Foundations lesson! The “secrets” present phonics patterns in the form of a feeling-based story and embedded mnemonic grapheme... kids adore them!

Think of UFLI Foundations as your backbone, your scope and sequence for phonics instruction. Like a backbone, it stays in place, providing structured, explicit, systematic, and sequential phonics instruction for approximately 30 minutes a day. In line with this analogy, the Secret Stories is your lifeblood, flowing fluidly throughout the veins of the day… moving to where it’s needed. The “secrets” are your differentiated support for students who may be ready to read or write a bigger word, or older students with phonics gaps.

5 ways to use the Secret Stories throughout your day:

1. Morning message: Introduce and review Secret Stories during your morning message—introduce one each day until you’ve covered them all—and then search for and notice them throughout the day. You may also have one of your students help write out the “mystery” morning message (see picture below).
2. UFLI lesson: Refer to Secret Stories that come up during your UFLI lessons, the 30 minutes of your literacy block focused on building word recognition skills.
3. Small group time: Reference Secret Stories during small group encoding/decoding. As you are working with students in small groups, draw their attention to unknown words and search for “secrets” in your decodable text.
4. Writing: Introduce or refer to Secret Stories while modeling writing, or use them on a “need to know” basis as students come to a word they need to write. Encourage invented spelling!
5. Choice time/free play: Support students to use the “secrets” to read and write unknown words during dramatic play! Students suddenly have the tools to write words for the “restaurant menu” or to create signs for the “play pet store.”

Let’s peek into a Kindergarten classroom…

I was invited into a Kindergarten classroom this past spring to observe my first UFLI Foundations lesson. I brought along two teachers from another district to participate in a “Learning Lab,” a day to visit classrooms in other buildings, reflect with the teachers that we observe, and plan for instruction going forward. UFLI Foundations was just as new to me as it was to these teachers—I was eager to see a lesson in action!

The lesson began, and the teacher introduced the “irregular/high frequency word” → they. She quickly explained that EY, the long ā sound, would not be introduced until a later lesson (I later looked in the book and learned this was almost 40 lessons later!) so students would need to remember the word by heart. She placed a small heart under the “ey” part of the word “they” and moved on.

Of course, after years of using the Secret Stories in my own classroom (and seeing amazing success), I did my best not to jump out of my seat shouting... “There’s a Secret Story for that!”

‘ay and ey…these letters are just too cool! With thumbs up and their coolest voices, they say eyyyyyyy.’

‘ay and ey…these letters are just too cool! With thumbs up and their coolest voices, they say eyyyyyyy.’

We must give our students access to the code when they need it.

The Secret Stories make learning tricky phonics patterns extra STICKY and memorable. Kids quickly connect to the social-emotional aspect of each story and are able to apply the phonics pattern to real reading and writing. I am constantly amazed watching Kindergarteners write words like “partner” and “smart” after just a few days of learning the r-controlled “secrets” (AR and ER/IR/UR).

Think about the number of times a child sees the word they in classroom books and read-alouds. And how often students write sentences that include the word “they”... it’s a pretty common word! If we have an engaging way to teach these tricky phonics patterns that actually helps kids remember them… we can’t afford to wait!

It is neurobiologically impossible for kids to think deeply about things they don’t care about. - Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

We have to get our kids to CARE if we want them to learn and apply these tricky phonics patterns. So the big idea here is… if you haven’t gotten to the UFLI Foundations lesson that explicitly teaches a phonics pattern (e.g. /ar/), and students need it to read or spell a word… The Secret Stories is your solution! Grab your Secret Stories book, turn to the story you need, and take 30 seconds to read it to your students. Then refer to it throughout the day!

When should I bring Secret Stories into my UFLI lesson?

There are many opportunities to bring Secret Stories into your UFLI lessons—I highlight and describe a few below. Note that each UFLI lesson takes two full days to teach. On day 1, you teach steps 1–5, and on day 2 you review step 5 and go through steps 6–8.

Steps 1–4 in the UFLI Foundations lessons are review steps, so I recommend bringing the Secret Stories into steps 5–8. Let’s talk about what this might look like throughout each UFLI Foundations lesson step:

1. Phonemic awareness: Students work on blending spoken phonemes (/m/ /o/ /th/ → students say “moth!”), and segmenting words into phonemes (say the sounds in the word path → students say “/p/ /a/ /th/”).
2. Visual drill: Students see a grapheme (letter or letter pattern that represents the sound) and connect it to its phoneme. Students say “M spells /m/.”
3. Auditory drill: Students listen to the teacher say a phoneme (/t/) and connect it to the grapheme as they write it. Students hear the sound and write it as they say “/t/ is t” on their whiteboard or paper.
4. Blending drill: Students review by blending sounds to read written words. The teacher uses the blending board (or whiteboard) to show the words, say each sound with students, and blend to read the whole word. Connected phonation is key—“make the sounds stick together as you say them.”
5. New concept: Students are introduced to a new phonics pattern and learn how to articulate the sound, form the grapheme, and read and write words with it. Let’s say you are teaching UFLI lesson #48 on ‘ch’ / ch /. At the very beginning of step #5 (the new concept) grab your Secret Story card for ‘ch’ and take 30 seconds to read or review the story… a great way to secure attention at the start of the lesson!

UFLI is the backbone, providing structured, explicit and interleaved practice throughout lessons… while the Secret Stories is the lifeblood, flowing fluidly throughout the day.

One part of the “new concept” step involves reading words with the new phonics pattern. Instead of quickly reading the isolated words “am, Pam, man, Sam, an, fan,” you might begin by engaging students and telling a made-up story about “Sam and Pam on a very hot day, who met a kind man with a fan!” We want to always be on the lookout for opportunities to bring stories into our phonics lessons.

Word work: During this step, students are practicing the focus skill by writing words using a “word chain.” The teacher prompts students to encode (spell) and decode (read) each word, changing one phoneme at a time.

chop → chip → chill → hill → dill → dull → mull → much → such → sun

This is a perfect point in the lesson to refer to your Secret Stories posters! You may notice several of your students are writing “cop” instead of “chop” in their word chain. Grab your “ch” Secret Story card and spend a moment re-reading the story and providing corrective feedback.

Irregular words: You get to step #7 in your UFLI lesson and look at the high-frequency word they, realizing the ‘ey’ pattern won’t show up in your scope and sequence for months… but your students already know the story! This is a perfect opportunity to grab your stack of Secret Story cards and take 30 seconds to review the story—maybe grab a pair of sunglasses and a leather jacket for added effect!

LINK HERE

Connected text: For this step, students are reading sentences and paragraphs with both high-frequency words and target phonics pattern words. Students have a printed decodable passage to practice reading in small groups or with a partner. This is a great opportunity to search for the “secret story” in each sentence and/or passage. You may have students circle as many “secrets” as they can find and then practice reading those words to a partner. Students also write dictated sentences during this step and may refer to the Secret Stories to spell tricky phonics patterns.

Is there a specific order to introduce The Secret Stories?

As a literacy coach, I am frequently asked… “When should I introduce each Secret Story? Is there an order or scope and sequence to teach them in?” to which I reply…

Start introducing Secret Stories on day 1 (30 seconds of your day) until you’ve taught them all! As Secret Stories is a supplement, there is no specific order or sequence to introduce them. Let’s revisit the analogy of UFLI Foundations as your backbone—your scope and sequence for phonics instruction. Like a backbone, it stays in place, providing structured, explicit, systematic, and sequential phonics instruction for approximately 30 minutes a day.

This frees you to provide access to the “Secrets” throughout the day! Secret Stories are the lifeblood of your classroom, flowing fluidly throughout the veins of the day—moving to where it’s needed. Putting your Secret Stories posters up on day 1 creates equity in the classroom and acts as differentiated support for students who are ready to read and write bigger words. Even if UFLI lessons haven’t covered a specific phonics pattern, a child can just “look up” and find the secret story they need.

We can follow a structured scope and sequence AND also give our students access to the code (the secrets!) when they need it.

Use the following checklist to keep track of which “secrets” you’ve introduced to students throughout the year:

How have I used Secret Stories and UFLI as a literacy coach?

One of my roles as a literacy coach is to work with districts and teachers to find curriculum resources that align with current literacy research. Since discovering the Secret Stories and UFLI Foundations, I’ve been using both in various ways across the districts I support:

1. Grant writing: I support teachers by writing grants. The most common grants we’ve written together the last few years have been for Secret Stories, UFLI Foundations (the book is the only cost for the program), and various decodable readers from Hello Decodables, Phonic Books, and Whole Phonics.
2. Leading professional learning: Since both Secret Stories and UFLI Foundations are fairly new to the teachers I work with, it’s important to provide professional learning throughout the year on both resources. Here are a few of the UFLI Foundations and Secret Stories sessions I’ve led alongside my coaching colleagues:

• UFLI Foundations Lesson (Day 1 and Day 2): Several professional learning sessions to outline each step of the lesson, language to use during instruction, and resources needed to teach.
• UFLI progress monitoring session: This session focuses on “day 5 activities” that include progress monitoring and review of the weekly UFLI lessons. There are SO many free resources in the UFLI toolbox (website) including roll and reads, decodable passages, and home practice sheets!
• Gamifying UFLI: This session provides ideas for extending UFLI lessons with games and practice activities as well as ideas for centers and small groups.
• UFLI refresher: During this session, teachers have had some time to teach UFLI lessons in their classrooms. We spend time reviewing each step of the lesson, reviewing language, and important reminders.
• Make and Take Workshops: These professional learning workshops are planned for teachers to create activities to enhance UFLI lessons and bring in the Secret Stories.
• Choose your own adventure – “All about the Secret Stories”: This professional learning day presents teachers with options for different sessions they choose to attend.

3. Coaching cycles: After leading professional learning, I meet with teachers one on one or in grade-level groups to begin coaching cycles. This is where the magic happens… but it’s a process!

Changing teacher practice in one area can take between 14–20 hours - L’Allier and Brown, 2020

Give yourself LOTS of grace if you’re trying out a new program/resource or changing up your literacy block! The steps of the coaching cycles include…

• Setting a student-centered goal
• Co-planning the lesson/series of lessons
• Instruction (I model, we co-teach, or I observe the teacher)
• Debriefing or reflecting

4. Activities for paraprofessionals and interventionists: Both UFLI and Secret Stories are amazing resources for our students who need a little extra support. I work with several interventionists to plan for and facilitate weekly “para huddles.” During these huddles, paraprofessionals learn about UFLI and the Secret Stories extension activities/games. They use some of the time to “make-and-take” phonics skill resources to use with students as well.

To wrap up…

So there you have it—UFLI Foundations and Secret Stories belong together in the classroom! For those of you already using both resources, some questions to consider…

• What are some ways you currently incorporate Secret Stories into your UFLI Foundations lessons?
• How might you bring Secret Stories into small group/center activities to reinforce your UFLI lessons? What are some partner or group practice activities you might plan?
• What other parts of your day might you refer to Secret Stories (math, science, writing, partner reading, etc.)?

UFLI roll & reads (insert somewhere if you’d like)

(This is a note-taking sheet I created for teachers to take notes as I model the UFLI lesson with Secret Stories. This was a Kindergarten teacher’s notes. Feel free to insert if you’d like.)

Pictures from the “Choose your own adventure PD”:

(From a “para huddle” — these are weekly make-and-take sessions I hold with paraprofessionals to focus on specific skills that the students they are working with need.)