When we rolled out the science of reading more seriously in first grade, the fastest gains after winter break came from tightening our phoneme-grapheme mapping routine and being very disciplined about decodable text rotation. The biggest shift was moving away from "one decodable per week" to a short daily cycle where the same target patterns showed up repeatedly across contexts. Our 15 minute intervention block was simple and repeatable. First five minutes were explicit phoneme-grapheme mapping. Students used sound boxes on dry erase boards. I dictated three to four words that matched our current focus, for example short a with digraphs. Students said the sounds, mapped the graphemes, then blended. No guessing, no pictures. The next five minutes were decodable rereads. We used two very short decodables instead of one longer one. The first read was whisper reading with teacher tracking. The second was timed but low pressure, just aiming for smoother blending. The last five minutes were sentence dictation pulled directly from the decodable text so decoding and encoding stayed aligned. What made it stick was how we monitored progress. We used a one page data sheet clipped to a clipboard. It tracked accuracy on the target phoneme-grapheme, number of words read correctly in one minute from a decodable passage, and one dictated sentence score. Teachers actually used it because it took under two minutes to fill out and directly matched the lesson. Within three weeks after winter break, we saw noticeable jumps in blending speed and a sharp drop in letter sound confusion, especially for students who had stalled earlier in the year.