Reading Help
Ways to Help Your Child Be a Better Reader
The
five main areas of reading development are: Phonological Awareness,
Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary and Comprehension.
PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS:
is considered the
building block for reading development. It is the ability to hear and
manipulate the sounds of spoken language. There are several skills children
need to master using Oral Language as a step to early reading. These
include:
-
Rhyming:
Children
need to practice identifying words that rhyme and produce rhyming
words. Using nursery rhymes are a great way to practice this.
-
Sentence
Segmentation:
Children need to be able to segment sentences into words. They can use
their hands to “chop” the sentence into words or use manipulative such
as counters to practice segmenting sentences.
-
Syllable Recognition:
Children practice both blending syllables together and dividing words
into syllables. Using hand motions helps make blending and segmenting
more concrete for early learners.
-
Onset and Rime
Identification:
Students need to be able to identify the initial consonant sound (onset)
and the vowel and any consonants that follow (rime). For example /C/
(onset) /at/ (rime).
PHONICS: The
goal of phonics instruction is to help children use the sound/symbol
relationship to read and write words. Phonics is different from
phonemic awareness because it now involves using letters to represent
the sounds. Phonics skills overlap with phonemic awareness in the area of
onset and rime and also include letter identification. There are three main
areas of phonics instruction. These include:
-
Letter-Sound
Correspondence- Students practice matching and identifying
sounds to letters (initial, final, and medial).
-
Word Study-
Children practice blending, sorting, blending, and segmenting the sounds
of letters into words and learn to identify high frequency words.
-
Syllable Patterns-
Students practice blending and segmenting syllables in words.
FLUENCY:
Reading fluently is the ability to read text quickly, accurately and
with proper expression. Fluency is the bridge between word
recognition and comprehension. The goal of fluent reading is to
recognize words automatically. Some ways to help with fluency are:
-
High Frequency Word
Recognition-
Building
a large “sight word” vocabulary is a proven way to increase reading
fluency.
-
Oral Reading-
Use timed reading practices to read with accuracy, speed and expression.
-
Repeated Readings-
Students read the same passage or book several times to read more
fluently.
-
Shadow Reading
and Choral Reading- Students read along with another more
fluent reader/s/ for modeling.
-
Read Aloud-
Students listen to fluent reading by teachers, parents and other
students. Hearing fluent readers serves as a model to help non fluent
readers improve.
VOCABULARY:
Vocabulary instruction helps provide students with an understanding of the
meaning and use of words so they can comprehend what they are reading and
communicate effectively.
COMPREHENSION:
Comprehension is defined
as the ability to understand and get meaning form spoken and written
language. It is the ultimate goal when learning to read. The goal
of Comprehension instruction is to teach children specific strategies to use
for understanding text as they read. Some of these activities include:
-
Sentence Structure
and Meaning:
Students practice
identifying important text elements and arrange word to make sentences.
-
Story Structure:
Students sequencing events, retelling story details and identifying
story elements (setting, characters, problem, solution).
-
Monitoring for
Meaning-
Students practice organizing information to gain meaning.
-
Main Idea/
Summarizing-
Students practice stating the main ideas in their own words. They also
work on summarizing sections of text.
To learn more about these areas and access resources to help with reading
skills check out the link below:
readingrockets.org
