Bring the literacy expertise of Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell to all students in your classroom—and open the doors to a world of opportunity beyond.
Fountas & Pinnell Classroom™ (FPC) is a cohesive, multi-text approach to literacy instruction for all students in grades PreK–6. The System is designed to support whole-group, small-group and independent learning opportunities including: interactive read-aloud; reading minilessons; writing minilessons; shared reading; phonics, spelling, and word study; guided reading; book clubs; and independent reading collections. Fountas & Pinnell Classroom™ is rich with authentic texts, lessons or conferring cards, minilessons and professional learning tools for a systematic, transformative approach to literacy instruction.
Lift students' learning beyond the walls of the classroom with texts and a blueprint for teaching that create authentic experiences in reading, thinking, talking, writing, and reflecting to realize what it truly means to live a literate life.
What is Guided Reading?
The Fountas & Pinnell Classroom™ (FPC) Guided Reading Collection is a small-group instructional context in which you support each reader’s processing of new challenging texts with hundreds of original titles (6 copies of each title) that span text levels A through Z, with an accompanying lesson folder for each title. By bringing together a small group of children who are at a similar point in their reading development and guiding them to process a text that is leveled on a gradient of difficulty, you are able to provide an incremental amount of challenge at each reader’s edge of ability to process text.
In guided reading, you meet students where they are and lead them forward with intention and precision. Students learn how to engage in every facet of the reading process and apply that literacy power to all instructional contexts.
What is Interactive Read-Aloud?
The Fountas & Pinnell Classroom™ Interactive Read-Aloud Collection is the foundation for literacy instruction, and is organized into text sets that reflect a global perspective with a diversity of characters, settings, and topics. Each text set contains four to six high-quality picture books with engaging illustrations that represent a variety of authors and illustrators, topics, genres, themes, and text structures. Each set of texts has been carefully curated around a connecting idea, central theme, or study of a particular author, illustrator, or genre.
Interactive read-aloud is the foundation of a community that shares literary understandings through thinking and talking together. It provides rich opportunities for every student to expand background knowledge, experience age-appropriate and grade-appropriate text, and learn a variety of ways to think deeply and use academic language to talk about an engaging text.
What is Shared Reading?
The Fountas & Pinnell Classroom™ Shared Reading Collection is made of up of exquisite texts which include a collection of original big books in grades PreK through 3 in a variety of genres, with accompanying lesson folders.
Six small copies of each book, as well as audiobooks, are provided for children to revisit during independent reading. Some of the books have special features such as flaps, cutouts, and foldouts to engage and excite children.
Versions
- English language, PreK-3
- Spanish language, PreK-2
Shared reading enables all children, regardless of their reading levels, to have enjoyable literacy opportunities every day. It allows children to “step up together” into more challenging texts while also beginning to notice and acquire the processes they need to read texts independently.
What are Book Clubs?
Book clubs provide an opportunity for children to apply many of the literacy behaviors and understandings that they have learned through other instructional contexts: thinking within, beyond, and about a text; listening and understanding; interacting socially; engaging in extended discussions; and more. As they bring together much of their learning in this one context, children find a sense of agency. The experience of exchanging ideas with their peers and co-constructing richer understandings of texts is genuinely rewarding.
As students bring together much of their learning during book clubs, they find themselves in control. Through sharing their thinking, they build a richer understanding than any one student could gain from independent reading alone.
What is Independent Reading?
Independent reading offers children the chance to read, enjoy, and interact with texts that they choose in order to gain “mileage” as readers. These collections were curated to provide high-quality trade books that help students explore their interests, flourish as readers, and develop the ability to independently read increasingly challenging texts.
Independent reading offers the opportunity for students to develop tastes as readers and to read a large number of self-selected books on their own. It is as students read, enjoy, and interact with texts that they choose that they will become lifelong readers.
What are Reading Minilessons?
Reading Minilessons are short, concise, explicit, inquiry-based lessons about a principle that students can apply to their own independent reading. Growing out of the interactive read-aloud experience and linked to independent reading, teachers use many of these texts as examples from which they generalize the understanding.
The Reading Minilessons Book, Paperback
The Reading Minilessons Book, Digital Edition
The Reading Minilessons Book, Paperback/Digital Bundle
Reading minilessons form the "glue" that connects literacy learning, makes it explicit, and turns it over to students to apply independently.
What are Writing Minilessons?
The Writing Minilessons Book provides brief, focused, explicit lessons that help children understand and apply the characteristics of effective writing and nurture their ability to write with purpose, imagination, and voice.
The interactive writing and writing minilessons in this book serve as a guide to a meaningful, systematic approach to literacy learning. When you surround children with literacy activities and print, provide them with time to write, encourage their efforts with enthusiasm, and gently guide them, you create the right conditions for kindergarteners to grow into confident, engaged writers. Put interactive writing lessons and writing minilessons into action and make learning visible for every child, every day.
Editions and versions:
- Joyful Writing in PreK, Print, Digital, or Print/Digital Bundle
- The Writing Minilessons Book, Kindergarten, Print, Digital, or Print/Digital Bundle
- The Writing Minilessons Book, Grade 1, Print, Digital, or Print/Digital Bundle
Foster joyful writing with minilessons that spark creativity, imagination, and learning.
What is Phonics, Spelling, and Word Study?
The Fountas & Pinnell Phonics, Spelling, and Word Study System (PWS) is a collection of 100 lessons (PreK-3) and 105 lessons (4-6) designed to expand and refine children’s reading and writing powers, and enable you to help children attend to, learn about, and efficiently use information about sounds, letters, and words. Phonics, Spelling, and Word Study Lessons, also include features that enable you to plan and teach efficiently and systematically:
- Explicit lessons with materials appropriate for whole-group instruction (5–10 minutes) and for individual, partners, or small-group application (10–15 minutes)
- (PreK) Sounds, Letters, and Words in PreKlessons are pre-organized in the suggested sequence for ease of use and convenient teaching
- Organization by the recommended sequence in grade PreK, lessons teach five of the nine areas of learning, Early Literacy Concepts, Phonological Awareness, Letter Knowledge, Spelling Patterns, and Word-Solving Actions
- (K-6) Master Lesson Guide: Suggested Sequence for Phonics Lessons: a convenient chart for planning and extending learning across the year
- Organization by nine areas of learning in grades K-1, six in grades 2-5, and five in grade 6— Early Literacy Concepts, Phonological Awareness, Letter Knowledge, Letter-Sound Relationships, Spelling Patterns, High-Frequency Words, Word Meaning/Vocabulary, Word Structure, and Word-Solving Actions
- Inquiry approach that encourages students to construct understandings and notice more about letters, sounds, and words
- Specific connections to Sing a Song of Poetry (K-2), to Words That Sing: Poetry Charts for Shared Reading(K-3), and to Fountas & Pinnell Classroom™ Interactive Read-Aloud Collectionand Shared Reading Collectiontitles as mentor texts and examples for generalizing and applying principles
- Guidance for assessing students’ learning within the lessons and in the online Assessment Guide found in Online Resources
- Digital classroom and teacher materials in Online Resources, such as Gamemaker, a tool to create and customize games and lesson activities
In any coherent system of literacy learning, such as Fountas & Pinnell Classroom™, phonics, spelling, and word study are not the end goal. Instead, these important understandings contribute to children's competence and ease in reading and writing continuous texts.
To explore all of the instructional contexts of Fountas & Pinnell Classroom™, download the digital samplers below.
~The Fountas & Pinnell Literacy™ Team
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