SIPPS 101
In 2021, I entered our beginning of year staff training and met our new literacy coach. She was leading a training on a new phonics curriculum called SIPPS. I had heard through the grapevine that this would be our new foundational skills curriculum. As my literacy coach explained what SIPPS was, my interest was piqued by just the name alone. SIPPS is an acronym that stands for Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, a curriculum purely dedicated to teaching phonics. This is what I had been searching for throughout my career as I had been flailing trying to figure out how to teach first graders how to read. Our previous curriculum had little to no instruction on how to guide students through phonics.
As my literacy coach continued the training, she reviewed each component of the lesson. The students go through oral phoneme manipulation, letter sounds, a decodable word list, sight words, reading a story, and writing. I gawked when she said all these components were to be taught in a thirty-minute time span. Just as I started to lose faith in her judgment, she proceeded to teach a demo lesson. She created a fake language and taught us fake sounds, then had us read a story. The lesson was fast paced, engaging, and challenging. It solidified the fact that learning how to read is challenging, but can be done systematically and in thirty minutes. For once, I felt like we had found a curriculum that would help our students learn how to read.
After the training, we were given our SIPPS binders and were sent to set up our classrooms. We had been told to find a dedicated space on our walls just for SIPPS materials. As I was mapping out my wall space, I realized that this curriculum was not only for thirty minutes every day but would be on display at all times. That is what SIPPS is: an all-encompassing curriculum that helps support students throughout every part of their day.
The next day we had to sit in multi-grade level bands, with first and second grade seated together. I quickly learned that SIPPS is best used as differentiated instruction across multiple grade levels. If a teacher were to teach SIPPS in just their classroom, they would be limited to roughly two small groups. There simply wouldn’t be enough time to differentiate beyond that. However, by combining both first and second grade, suddenly we have 6 teachers for 12 small groups. That flexibility allowed us to fine-tune our differentiation down to whether a student was struggling with sight words or sounds within the same series of lessons.
The 1 and 2 on the side indicate grade level. Each teacher has 2 groups, each group has a color name attached to it so we can differentiate. The number in the parentheses is the lesson the group started on. For example Franco Cobalt (Ex 17) means Ms. Franco’s group started on Extension 17. Jang Morado (B 11) was Ms. Jang’s group who started on Beginning 11. The Jang Silver and Bronze group does not have a lesson number because they were two groups that had already graduated out of SIPPS and were focusing on comprehension. It should also be noted that Ms. Barba had 3 different groups running at this time because she is a superstar.
At the beginning of the school year, all students were given the SIPPS screener, which would place them within a 10 lesson range. Then, students were divided based on screener result and behavior. Every 10 lessons, students take a mastery test, which assesses their knowledge on the content of the previous 10 lessons. This mastery test data is used to help regroup students. Massive regroupings happen every couple months, however smaller regroupings can occur between two teachers frequently. For example, there were two groups placed within the same 10 lessons. Both teachers felt a shift in their group, with half of their students excelling and the other half struggling. They decided to regroup and put all the students who passed the mastery test in the same group so they could continue to move on while the half that did not pass would be put together and relearn the content in order to master it. These quick changes create curated small groups that allow students to be systematically taught phonics and sight words at their exact level. This amount of hyper-differentiation creates powerful change.
SIPPS can be done on an individual basis, but it is much stronger if the entire staff is dedicated to using it. We have seen tremendous growth in our reading this year. We have the highest STAR reading scores we have ever had due to this curriculum and the dedication of the entire staff. One of the biggest questions we get from visitors is “How did you get so much teacher buy in? How were you able to roll this out for the whole school?”. For me, the answer is simple, when you have teachers dedicated to their students and cognizant of the fact that literacy rates are tied to unemployment and incarceration rates, doing anything else is not an option. We, as a staff, understood how vital it was to teach each and every one of our students how to read, and the SIPPS program seemed like our best bet.
The first year of implementing SIPPS was challenging. Teachers were not pacing the material correctly, fumbling through the several components, students were still learning the new routines, and parents were confused why their child had more than one teacher. With any new implementation, there was a big learning curve. If you or your school is thinking about implementing SIPPS, remember to give yourself grace. It took several months before the teachers, students, and families were feeling comfortable.
Once SIPPS was being implemented, I noticed a big shift in my classroom. My students were actually reading! Students who might have slipped through the cracks in previous years were now being taught in differentiated groups. Each child was getting the instruction that they needed. Even with the fumbles, kids were learning how to read. My students started to read the words in my morning message on their own. They could read the schedule up on the board. They were excited to silently read if they finished their work early. Literacy became a huge part of our day. And this translated to their scores as well. Students were testing at higher levels than ever before, across each grade level.
Armed with the data to support us, we continue to push through as a staff and further improve in our SIPPS implementation. In our second year of teaching SIPPS as an entire school, there are new problems that we face. For example, the first and second grade teachers are facing an exciting issue: more students reading than ever before! With so many students graduating out of the program, we must now shift our focus on how to teach reading comprehension through book clubs and fluency checks. With each passing year, we predict more and more students will be on grade level. As teachers become more adept in their instruction and students are more fluid in their transitions, more learning will be happening. The data that we see is a result of the hard work of the entire teaching staff, administration, and literacy coach collaborating in order to teach SIPPS every day to every child. One teacher armed with SIPPS can make a difference in their classroom, an entire school using SIPPS can make a difference in their community.