Grouping by Skills, Not Levels: The Better Way to Teach Reading in K–2
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Reading groups can feel overwhelming. You have students who need very different things, but you’re often expected to sort them by level and hope for the best.
But what if we stopped grouping by reading level altogether?
Skill-based grouping is a better way to meet your students where they actually are. Instead of lumping students together based on an arbitrary level or score, you focus on the specific skills each child needs to develop.
What is Skill-Based Grouping?
Skill-based grouping means organizing your reading groups by the exact skills your students need help with.
For example:
- Students working on phonemic awareness (blending, segmenting, manipulating sounds)
- Students focusing on phonics skills (specific sound-spelling patterns)
- Students building fluency (accuracy, expression, pacing)
- Students practicing comprehension (retelling, making inferences, understanding text structure)
Instead of a mixed bag of needs, every student in the group is working on the same skill. This makes your instruction more focused and effective.
Traditional grouping often relies on broad reading levels. But reading is made up of many subskills. A child might read “on level” but still struggle with blending sounds or understanding vocabulary. Skill-based grouping allows you to target exactly what each student needs.
Why Skill-Based Grouping Works (Science of Reading Perspective)
The science of reading shows us that learning to read isn’t one big skill. It’s a combination of many smaller skills that need to develop together. Scarborough’s Reading Rope illustrates this perfectly: decoding and language comprehension strands must both be strengthened over time.
The National Reading Panel highlights five essential components of reading instruction:
- Phonemic awareness
- Phonics
- Fluency
- Vocabulary
- Comprehension
Skill-based grouping allows you to focus on one strand at a time, ensuring students build a solid foundation before moving on. You’re not rushing ahead because a level chart says you should. You’re following the actual progression of skills supported by cognitive science.
When students get targeted practice on exactly what they need, you build automaticity. Their brains can process text more efficiently because the foundational skills are strong.
How Ehri’s Phases Guide Skill-Based Grouping
Ehri’s Phases of Word Reading Development give us a helpful framework for understanding where students are in their reading journey. You can use these phases to guide your skill-based groups as well:
- Pre-Alphabetic Phase: Focus on phonological awareness, letter names, and basic concepts of print. Activities include sound boxes, syllable sorting, and alphabet arcs.
- Partial Alphabetic Phase: Students are learning letter-sound correspondences but may still rely on initial letters or visual cues. Focus on blending and segmenting sounds, phoneme grapheme correspondence, and early word chains.
- Full Alphabetic Phase: Students are decoding whole words by attending to every grapheme. Work on advanced phonics patterns, multisyllabic words, and dictation activities.
- Consolidated Alphabetic Phase: Students recognize chunks of words, morphemes, and word families. Focus shifts to fluency, morphology, and comprehension using connected text.
- Automatic Phase: Decoding is automatic and fluent. Instruction can focus heavily on vocabulary, comprehension, and higher-level text analysis.
When you assess your students’ current phase, it becomes much easier to see what specific skills they need next. This allows you to create highly targeted small groups that grow with your students over time.
Practical Benefits in Your Classroom
When you switch to skill-based grouping, you’ll notice several benefits:
- More focused small group lessons – You can plan lessons that meet everyone’s needs at once because they share the same skill focus.
- Efficient use of your time – No more juggling multiple skills within one group.
- Visible progress – Students master one skill at a time and you can clearly see their growth.
- Better support for all learners – Struggling readers get targeted intervention. On-level readers strengthen weaker subskills. Advanced readers continue progressing without being held back by arbitrary levels.
For example:
- A group of kindergarteners struggling with blending sounds practices tapping out phonemes using Elkonin boxes and finger tapping.
- A group of first graders learning vowel teams works on word mapping activities targeting ai and ay.
- A second grade group focuses on comprehension strategies using decodable texts at their decoding level, but with increasingly complex vocabulary.
Implementing Skill-Based Grouping Successfully
Getting started with skill-based grouping doesn’t have to be complicated.
- Assess students’ skills – Use simple phonemic awareness checks, phonics screeners, fluency passages, and comprehension questions.
- Group by need – Organize groups based on which skill needs the most attention.
- Plan targeted lessons – Choose one skill per group to focus on during each cycle.
- Reassess regularly – Use quick informal assessments to adjust groups as students progress.
You may have students who move groups frequently – that’s a good thing. The goal is flexible, responsive instruction based on where each child is today.
The Positive Impact of Skill-Based Grouping
When you teach this way, reading groups feel purposeful. You’re no longer scrambling to differentiate within one group. Instead, every student gets exactly what they need, right when they need it.
This approach removes the pressure of arbitrary reading levels and focuses on what matters most, skill mastery.
Take a look at your current groups. Are they based on levels, or skills? If you want to simplify your small groups while getting better results, start shifting toward skill-based grouping.
Ready to make skill-based grouping simple? My Reading Intervention Grouping Tool and Small Group Lesson Plan Templates give you everything you need to assess, organize, and plan effective reading groups quickly. Check them out here to streamline your small group instruction.
