Blending and segmenting games and activities can help students to develop phonemic awareness — the ability to hear the individual sounds in spoken words. Begin with segmenting and blending syllables, and then move to working with individual sounds (phonemes). Learning to blend and segment sounds is key to learning to read.
To comprehend a story or text, young readers need a threshold of knowledge about the topic, and tougher state standards place increasing demands on children’s prior knowledge. This article offers practical classroom strategies to build background knowledge such as using contrasts and comparisons and encouraging topic-focused wide reading.
What should fluency instruction look like? And what can teachers do to help students whose fluency is far behind their peers’? This article can help practitioners effectively use fluency-based assessments and select instructional practices.
From difficulty recognizing the individual sounds in spoken words to developing and maintaining the motivation to read, here are the most common reasons why children can struggle with reading.
Paired reading is a strategy to help students build fluency by reading aloud to each other. More fluent readers can be paired with less fluent readers, or children who read at the same level can be paired to reread a story.
In addition to explicit phonics instruction, teachers need to support students’ ability to understand complex text and build background knowledge. Teachers also deserve access to high-quality curriculum materials — a thoughtfully arranged, comprehensive, sequential curriculum that embeds standards, the science of reading, and key instructional shifts.
Fluency is a child’s ability to read a book or other text with accuracy, at a reasonable rate, and with appropriate expression. Reading fluency is important because it provides a bridge between word recognition and comprehension.
Children’s knowledge of letter names and shapes is a strong predictor of their success in learning to read. Knowing letter names is strongly related to children’s ability to remember the forms of written words and their ability to treat words as sequences of letters.
Launa Hall’s travels take her to Italy, land of transparent orthography, where she discovers how real-world learning opportunities and strong, long-term relationships between teachers and students benefit students of all ages.
Rather than introducing a new word in isolation, teachers should introduce students to a rich variety of words that share the same root. This approach should help diverse learners including English language learners, make important connections among vocabulary words within the same family, and transfer core ideas across content areas.
Fluency is the ability to read a text accurately, quickly, and with expression.Fluent reading builds stamina for reading lengthy or complex texts. Reading fluency serves as a bridge between word recognition and comprehension.
Reading expert Linda Farrell shows Xavier how to read and spell unfamiliar multisyllable words with one vowel letter in each syllable. First she makes sure that Xavier has three prerequisite skills: being able to read one-syllable nonsense words, knowing how to count syllables in spoken words, and naming the vowel letters. Xavier learns that every syllable has a vowel, and that he can count the vowel letters to break a long word into syllables to make it easy to read. To figure out how many syllables are in a word, Ms. Farrell teaches Xavier to ask two questions: How many vowels are in the word? Are the vowels together or apart? In a separate video below, Ms. Farrell listens to Xavier read aloud to help him read with accuracy.
Word study is an approach to spelling instruction that moves away from a focus on memorization. The approach reflects what researchers have discovered about the alphabetic, pattern, and meaning layers of English orthography. This article describes nine tips for implementing a word study program in your classroom.
The term “onset-rime” refers to the division of a syllable into two parts: the onset and the rime. The onset is the initial consonant sound, blend, or digraph, and the rime is the following vowel and all subsequent sounds in the syllable. Understanding onset and rime is fundamental in phonological awareness.
