Working with the HMH Medallions First Grade Pacing Guide
The Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Medallions program for first grade comes with a pacing guide that lays out the scope and sequence for reading, writing, vocabulary, grammar, and spelling across the school year. It's not a standalone document you can just download and run with. You need access through the MyView Reading or HMH online platform, typically via your school district's subscription. The guide itself is part of the teacher resources inside the program suite, and the exact URL varies by district licensing agreement. If you're trying to find it, log into your district's HMH portal, navigate to the first-grade Medallions course, and look under resources or planning tools for the pacing guide or scope and sequence PDF. Some districts also distribute it as a printable document through their curriculum coordinators. The core of the pacing guide is built around units and lessons that cycle through decodable texts, phonics patterns, sight words, read-alouds, and writing workshops. A typical first-grade Medallions year is organized into roughly 8 to 10 units, each spanning about 3 to 5 weeks depending on how your school schedules it. The guide breaks down what skill or phonics pattern to teach each week, which lessons to assign, and what assessments align to each unit. It also factors in benchmark testing windows, which matters because those dates are usually fixed by the district and can't be moved around easily. I've worked with this program for several years, and the pacing guide works well when you follow it closely. The problem shows up when something doesn't go according to plan. Let me give you a real example. In the 2023-2024 school year, my district added late October as a week for standardized reading assessments. The original pacing guide had Unit 4 phonics lessons (r-controlled vowels and digraphs like sh, ch, th) scheduled during that exact week. There was no built-in buffer. I ended up pushing the r-controlled vowel lessons into the following week and pulling two spelling lessons from Unit 5 back to fill the gap. What I did was print the pacing guide, color-code the weeks that had assessment conflicts, and manually shift lessons on a spreadsheet while keeping the essential skills in order. The key rule I followed: never drop the foundational phonics progression. You can shuffle spelling or writing activities around, but if you miss the vowel team block, kids will struggle when the decodable texts suddenly get harder.
One thing most people don't realize about this pacing guide is how much the digital platform assumes you'll follow it linearly. The lesson assignments in HMH auto-schedule based on the pacing template, and if you change the dates in the platform, the student dashboards shift too. I learned this the hard way when a substitute teacher changed a few lesson dates and then three weeks of student practice assignments got reordered automatically. Kids who were already behind on a phonics skill got assigned the next skill before they'd mastered the current one. I had to go back and manually reset the assignments for about 25 students. The workaround is to lock the pacing guide dates after you input them and only change them when absolutely necessary. Also, make a backup copy of your pacing schedule in a separate file before you start making edits. Another counter-intuitive detail: the pacing guide lists suggested time allocations for each lesson, but those numbers are optimistic. A 30-minute phonics lesson in the guide often runs 40 to 45 minutes in practice, especially in the first semester when kids are still adjusting to the routine. The guide builds in review days, but they're thin. I've found that adding a second review day per unit — even if it means slowing the pace slightly — actually saves time later because kids retain the material and you spend less time re-teaching. It sounds backwards, but going a little slower through the phonics blocks in Units 1 through 4 pays off during the vocabulary-heavy middle units. There are limitations worth noting. The pacing guide is designed for a standard 180-day school year with daily language arts blocks. If your school has blocked scheduling, shorter periods, or frequent absences built into the calendar, the guide doesn't account for that. You'll need to do your own compression work. Another issue is that the guide treats all students as if they're starting from roughly the same baseline, which is rarely true. In my experience, about 30 to 40 percent of a first-grade class enters the year significantly below grade level in phonemic awareness. The pacing guide doesn't include remedial pathways or intervention blocks. If your school doesn't have a separate intervention period, you'll need to build differentiation into your daily lessons, which means the pacing guide becomes more of a framework than a strict plan.
For teachers who need more flexibility, some districts supplement the HMH Medallions pacing guide with a custom document that maps the essential standards onto their own calendar. You can take the HMH scope and sequence — which is available as a separate PDF from the platform — and cross-reference it with your state's first-grade ELA standards. This takes a few hours at the start of the year but gives you a document that matches your actual schedule. There's also a free alternative worth considering if your district doesn't provide the full HMH suite: the ReadWorks pacing calendars and the Commoncore aligned first-grade ELA scope and sequences from various state education websites. They're not as polished or integrated, but they cover the same ground. If you're looking for the direct download, the pacing guide lives inside the HMH MyView Reading platform at myviewreading.com or through your district's single sign-on portal. Look for the Planning or Resources tab once you're in the first-grade course. If your school doesn't have a subscription, talk to your curriculum coordinator — they should be able to share the PDF. Outside of that, there isn't an official public download link, and any third-party site offering it is likely distributing it without authorization from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The guide is solid if you treat it as a starting point rather than a strict contract. The real value is in how you adjust it for your students, your schedule, and the skills that actually need more time. Don't skip the phonics progression. Do build in review. And keep a backup of your pacing schedule somewhere outside the platform before you start making changes.
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