The Rainbow Phonics Scope and Sequence is designed to take children through from emergent to fluent over the course of four years. Specifically, the Rainbow Phonics Scope and Sequence is broken down into Phases.  In simple terms: Phase 1 covers Phonemic Awareness; Phase 2 the first 18 letter patterns; Phase 3 the next 22 letter patterns; Phase 4 adjacent consonants; Phase 5 remaining letter sounds including vowel digraphs; Phase 5.5 vowel teams and sound families; Phase 6 prefixes and suffixes.

At Pre-K, children will be introduced to the eight aspects of Phase 1, including phonemic awareness training, language and vocabulary development and the learning of alphabet knowledge.  

At K-Grade, children will be introduced to Phases 2-4, including the first 40 letter-sound correspondences and completing the year with adjacent consonants and multisyllabic words.  Around 40 heart words (common exception or tricky) are also introduced weekly according to the scope and sequence.  

By 1st Grade, children will move to Phases 5 and 5.5, where they will learn the remaining vowel digraphs and they will consolidate learning through the explicit teaching of vowel teams and sound families.  They will also continue to learn heart words weekly and will be introduced to basic suffixes by the end of the school year.

In 2nd Grade, children will take a deep dive into morphology, including prefixes and suffixes.  They will review vowel teams and sound families, often through homophone word examples.  They will also be taught dictionary and proofreading skills.  

Together, the Rainbow Phonics Scope and Sequence is fast paced.  This is intentional, as it enables children to quickly expand their decoding skills and advance through decodable readers.  Within the program there are weeks reserved for revision and these can be used to spread out the scope and sequence over a longer period of time if the pace is deemed too fast.  Alternatively, the whole program can be stretched across an additional year if needed and this may be relevant when a majority of students are coming from English second language backgrounds.  Overall, the scope and sequence covers all the different letter patterns of the English language and does this in a logical and systematic way, with the ultimate goal of achieving fluency as fast as possible.