Blast Foundations
Build Strong Reading Skills
1st Grade Prevention: Whole-class, supplemental, first-instruction
Intervention: RTI Tier II and III, early intervention 1st–3rd, intensive 3rd–5th
Prevent and remediate reading failure early. Blast is the best foundational reading program. It is fast and easy to teach. It builds strong literacy foundations for all future academic achievement.
Blast Foundations Classroom Setup
Everything one teacher needs to teach 20 students:
- 1 x Virtual Implementation Teacher Training Course seat
- 1 x Blast Foundations Teacher Lesson Plan Books Set
- 1 x Blast Foundations Online
- 10 x Blast Foundations Student Kits (1 kit per every 2 students)
- 20 x Guided Practice Blast Foundations Student Workbooks Sets
- 20 x Reading Playground school year licenses
1 x Vowel Poster Set
**Suggested add-on - 10 sets of SyllaBoards™ Kit 3 - Grades K-1
All the lessons are built for, the teacher and include a thorough explanation of the concepts, routines, and procedures. The lessons are easy to follow so they can be taught by a wide range of educators, not just seasoned literacy professionals, and phonics specialists. For those unfamiliar with teaching phonemic awareness and phonics, the guides include incremental professional development for each lesson.
Build Teacher Knowledge Every Day
We believe in the power of professional development. We offer incremental and embedded literacy training in all our teacher tools. We tailor our tools to meet educators at their level, offering scaffolded support throughout lessons. Empower teachers with knowledge that can be used across the curriculum. Teacher Tools in the classroom setup include:
Virtual Implementation Training Course - School Year Subscription
An interactive virtual training course that can be referenced throughout the year! Teachers learn at their own pace with incremental exposure to key literacy concepts and teaching techniques.
Teacher Guides Set With Incremental Professional Development
No phonological awareness or phonics background needed! Offers comprehensive support and incremental professional development. With easy-to-follow, scripted lessons and thorough explanations of concepts, routines, and procedures, even non-literacy professionals can effectively teach these essential literacy skills!
Teacher Presentation Online Tool With Embedded Professional Development - School Year Subscription
Maximize student engagement. An essential companion to the teacher guides and allows educators to learn while teaching. This online teaching tool virtually eliminates teacher prep time and delivers multiple exposures to key concepts and skills with interactive and vibrant animations. Accessible on any device, it's the ultimate resource for dynamic teaching.
School and Teacher Dashboard Facilitating Data-Driven Decision-Making
The School and Teacher Dashboards capture real-time data from the Reading and Vocabulary Playgrounds and measure with every click each student's progress, strengths, and weaknesses. By gathering this critical differentiating data, our Teacher and School Dashboards equip all teachers and administrators with actionable insights needed to make informed, effective data-driven decisions, and provide differentiation and individualization.
Build Student Skills Through Practice
Practice is imperative to student success. We believe in the transformative potential of complex student practice. We build resources and interfaces that offer scaffolded, cumulative exposures to key foundational literacy skills, and as a result, our outcomes are exceptional. Our student practice tools include:
10 Student Letter Tile Kits
How can you make learning sticky? Enhance learning with multisensory practice using our magnetic color and letter tiles, plus SyllaBoards™. Student love their kits! Happy students are engaged students.
20 Guided Practice Student Workbooks
Do you want exceptional student outcomes? Our workbooks are crucial for student success, fostering mastery and automaticity through guided practice
. They aid skill transfer to independent reading and spelling while enhancing learning and memory through handwriting
20 Seats - Reading & Vocabulary Playground Practice Portal
An engaging and play-based independent student practice portal, that captures real-time data and measures students’ strengths and weaknesses with every click. Designed to accelerate skill acquisition, support emerging readers' fluency transition, and provide differentiated practice opportunities.
Schedule a Science of Reading Curriculum Overview
Do You Want Exceptional Student Outcomes? Are you looking for a Science of Reading curriculum solution? Do you want to raise reading scores and get every child reading? For 18 Years, we've been a pioneer in teaching the Science of Reading. Our trusted, proven, easy-to-implement, research-based, systematic, structured literacy approach ensures exceptional student outcomes. Teachers and students love it. Don't settle for less.
Blast - Student Group Size, Scope and Sequence, and Lesson Structure
Blast Foundations lessons can be taught in various group sizes, depending on your situation. When used in early 1st grade, Blast can be taught as a whole class supplement, thus the group sizes are large. When it is taught as an intervention in 2nd grade, it is typically taught in smaller groups.
The Blast Foundations scope and sequence is systematic and cumulative.
The scope and sequence covers explicit instruction in the foundational skills needed to help students who struggle with basic skills in reading in 1st Grade. They will learn how to master reading words with complex consonant constructions in Closed Syllables, Open Syllables, Vowel-Consonant-e Syllables, Vowel Team Syllables, and inflectional endings. Students also learn how to apply functional strategies to successfully read multisyllabic words with ease. Blast targets the skills students need to build confidence with decoding skills in order to become accurate fluent readers.
For a full scope and sequence, click here to download the Blast Foundations Sample Lesson>>
Blast has 25 units which are comprised of 5 lessons per week. Each lesson keeps students actively engaged in the learning process with multisensory teaching. In one week, students are immersed in 75-100 minutes of explicit instruction.
- Lesson 1 (Monday) – Letter Sounds / High-Frequency Words
- Lesson 2 (Tuesday) – Phonemic Awareness
- Lesson 3 (Wednesday) – Phonics Instruction
- Lesson 4 (Thursday) – Student Practice
Detective Work
Word Sort
Partially-Controlled Phrase Reading
New! Blast Foundation Passages, to be taught after Lesson 4 - Lesson 5 (Friday) – Wrap-Up
Partially-Controlled Phrase and Sentence Reading
Spell It! (Review and practice words with phonics concepts from Lesson 3)
Are You Considering Using Blast Foundations for Intervention?
Use Our Assessments. They Are the Best in Reading Education
Are you already implementing Blast Foundations? Save time and use your easy-to-read Teacher Dashboard, which provides comprehensive student reporting of our Reading and Vocabulary Playgrounds! Manage student data and make immediate adjustments to improve outcomes.
Not yet implementing Blast Foundations? Use our FREE Diagnostic Decoding Assessments and Grouping Matrix. In just 5-7 minutes, our assessments answer these key questions: Which students are struggling with decoding? What types of words are they struggling with? What is the source of the underlying confusion? They provide everything necessary for initial assessments of unlimited students and can be used with our complimentary Grouping Matrix, to group, plan, progress monitor, and tailor instruction for optimal results.
Diagnostic Decoding Surveys
The Diagnostic Decoding Surveys are two complimentary assessments used in 2nd-12th grade:
Beginning Decoding Survey assesses:
- Simple and complex single-syllable words (with short vowels, digraphs, blends, and closed syllables in real and nonsense words)
- Select sight words
Advanced Decoding Survey assesses:
- Complex single-syllable words (with short, long, r-controlled, variant vowels, complex consonant constructions like trigraphs, and 3-sound blends in real and nonsense words)
- Decodable two- and three-syllable words (real and nonsense)
1st Grade Foundational Skills Surveys
A complimentary set of assessments used:
- In 1st grade or with older students who perform well below expectations on the Beginning and Advanced Decoding Surveys
- As a one-on-one assessment of 1st-grade foundational literacy skills, including:
- Simple and complex single-syllable words (with short vowels, digraphs, blends, closed syllables, and various long vowel spellings)
- Decodable two-syllable words
- Select sight words
Optional assessments for sight words, letter-sound knowledge, and letter-name knowledge
Sight Words Survey
The Sight Words Survey is a complimentary set of assessments that determine how well a student reads high-frequency English words. It is designed to be used:
- at the beginning of Kindergarten through 3rd grade
- and with older students who still struggle to read high-frequency sight words
One-on-one assessment of:
- High-frequency sight word knowledge from the Pre-Primer through 3rd-grade levels of the Dolch 220 list
- Automaticity reading sight words both in context (simple sentences) and in isolation
The data collected from these assessments can help determine the levels of sight words with which students are proficient and the levels with which they need more instruction and practice to gain automaticity.