CKLA Skills

Welcome to the Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA™) program! CKLA is divided into two strands: a Skills Strand and a Knowledge Strand. The Skills Strand teaches foundational building blocks for reading!

• CKLA focuses on sounds, or phonemes, as the primary organizing principle of the program.
• CKLA uses a synthetic phonics approach which teaches students to read by blending through the word; it does not teach multiple cueing strategies, use of pictures as a primary resource in decoding, or part-word guessing.
• CKLA begins by teaching the most common or least ambiguous spelling for a sound (the basic code spelling); later it teaches spelling alternatives for sounds that can be spelled several different ways. The system is kept simple at first, and complexity is added bit by bit as students gain confidence and automatize their reading and writing skills.
• CKLA does not emphasize the use of letter names in the early lessons of Kindergarten, because what is most important for reading is not the letter names but the sound values the letters stand for. To read the word cat, it is essential to think and say /k/ /a/ /t/, not “see aay tee.”