A full-time reading resource teacher works in collaboration with classroom teachers to promote successful reading experiences. Small group, direct instruction is utilized for K-5 students requiring additional reading support.
According to the National Reading Panel, the five essential components of reading are…
*Phonemic Awareness
Phonemes, the smallest units making up spoken language, combine to form syllables and words. Phonemic awareness refers to the student’s ability to focus on and manipulate these phonemes in spoken words. According to the National Reading Panel, teaching phonemic awareness to children significantly improves their reading ability.
*Phonics
Phonics is the relationship between letters or word families, short vowels, long vowels, and letter combinations and the sounds they represent. As determined by the National Reading Panel, phonics instruction helps early elementary students develop proficiency in decoding, spelling and understanding words.
*Fluency
Fluency is the ability to read as well as we speak and to make sense of the text without having to stop and decode each word. The National Reading Panel’s research findings concluded that guided, repeated reading significantly improves word recognition, reading fluency, and comprehension in students of all ages.
*Vocabulary
Vocabulary development is closely connected to comprehension. According to the National Reading Panel, students need to hear, read, understand, and use vocabulary words in various contexts to build their comprehension levels. Repetition, aided by quizzes, glossaries, and crossword puzzles, is paramount to building vocabulary.
*Comprehension
Comprehension is the level of content understanding a student has after reading a passage. The National Reading Panel determined that young readers develop text comprehension through a variety of techniques, including answering questions (quizzes) and summarization (retelling the story).
Phonemic awareness instruction provides children with opportunities to experience spoken language before they start to learn the written language. The ability to hear and manipulate sounds is referred to as phonemic awareness. Implicit in this definition is the fact that children need to hear the sounds of language. Hearing the sounds of words is completely independent of the meaning of those words. It is also important for children to identify the sequence of sounds within an oral unit. Phonemic awareness is the ability of children to understand the relationship that phonemes play in word formation. The importance of phonemic awareness lies in the fact that it lets children know that language can be manipulated. By combining sounds, subtracting sounds, and rearranging sounds, we can create elements known as words. It is these words that help us communicate with each other. For young children the path to communication begins with the ability to hear the sounds in words, the various positions of those sounds within one or more words, and an understanding of the role of those sounds within a single word. Phonemic awareness is a sequenced series of oral language skills that precede a child's transition into written language. Phonemic awareness does not "just happen." It is a sequential and developmental process. Certain abilities precede others and must be mastered before other skills can be learned. Forming a strong foundation in phonemic awareness abilities is a precursor to the foundation of reading skills that takes place in the reading process. Taken from; "The Complete Phonemic Awareness Handbook" |