When you say that you spend equal times on reading comprehension and the foundational skills phonological awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency , I think you are making a big mistake. That is not enough time for kids to develop those foundational skills in my opinion, and I think you'll slow their growth in reading.
If your colleagues are devoting all of the time to foundational skills because those are benchmarked , they may be doing long-term damage; foundational skills are necessary, but insufficient to make students capable readers. A final word… these overall times are not a good description of a school day. When I say, there should be 30 or 48 or 60 minutes devoted to a particular aspect of literacy, that does not mean that teachers should teach phonics from AMAM.
The reason I say that is that young children need lots of changes of activities and they need opportunities to move. I might read to kids with discussion for 10 or 15 minutes covering half of my language time , but then could follow that up with a minute writing activity, or a minute phonics activity—or even an activity focused on some other aspect of the curriculum such as science or math.
The point is that it is important to keep the day varied and engaging and the amounts of time can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Russ Walsh said Tim, You said, "reading comprehension refers to participating in reading text and answering questions and learning strategies for thinking about text.
As I read the literature on this it is generally purported to be reading comprehension instruction and appropriate for emergent readers. October 21, at AM. Reading comprehension and listening comprehension are different but related processes. For kids through about 8th grade, reading comprehension is the tougher of the two. It is certainly sensible to emphasize listening comprehension instead of reading comprehension when children cannot yet read this is even true with older students who can't read , but I see no benefit to pretending that oral language work is the same thing as reading comprehension instruction perhaps this confusion is why so many primary grade teachers stop working with oral language as soon as reading comprehension work begins?
I would encourage preschool and kindergarten teachers to focus heavily on vocabulary development, extended conversation, oral presentation, sentence elaboration, and listening comprehension, but I would discourage them from labeling those as reading comprehension. I am a full-day kindergarten teacher, and I agree that using half of one's instructional time to discuss read-alouds and calling this comprehension instruction falls far short of a quality emergent reading program.
Kids are sounding out and spelling words on slates by the time we've been in school a month. At first I segment the CVC words for them, but soon kids get the hang of how to stretch out and listen for sounds, recording them on boards and sometimes illustrating words for fun. Kids sound out and spell words daily I never miss this part of literacy.
These lessons lead into writer's workshop, where I expect kids to listen for sounds and write what they hear. Writing gives meaning to phonics lessons, because students soon understand that sounds can be set down using letters. Writing is fundamental for developing good readers! Another component of our program includes guided reading groups, using decodable text, and the accompanying centers that kids work on when not with me.
The final components of our literacy program include independent reading, a daily read-aloud and discussion usually in a content area , and shared reading, using a big book or other easy text. We are a Title 1 school, and at the end of last year only five out of 96 of our kinder students were labeled below grade level in literacy by our district. Related: Reading, writing and arguing: Can a summer of big questions push students to college? They need to be taught how letters represent speech sounds.
But by the time scientists had done all the studies to conclude this for sure, a different set of beliefs about reading was already deeply entrenched in many American schools and colleges of education. Debates about reading go back centuries. In the s, Horace Mann, the father of the public-school movement in the United States, railed against the idea of teaching children that letters represent sounds. He believed children should be taught to read whole words. On the other side of the debate were people who believed in phonics.
That means teaching children that words are made up of parts and showing them how different letters and combinations of letters connect to the speech sounds in words. No one really knew how children actually learned to read, or how they should be taught. Related: When reading a book means more than just looking at text on a page.
Whole language was a movement of people who believed that children and teachers needed to be freed from the tedium of phonics instruction. Phonics lessons were seen as rote, old-fashioned, and kind of conservative.
The essential idea in whole language was that children construct their own knowledge and meaning from experience. Whole language proponents thought phonics lessons might actually be bad for kids, might inhibit children from developing a love of reading by making them focus on tedious skills like breaking words into parts. But the phonics folks kept pushing back. The battle between whole language and phonics got so heated that the U.
Congress eventually got involved, convening a National Reading Panel to review all the research on reading. In , the panel released a report. The sum of the research showed that explicitly teaching children the relationship between sounds and letters improved reading achievement. The panel concluded that phonics lessons help kids become better readers. There is no evidence to say the same about whole language.
After the National Reading Panel report, whole language proponents could no longer deny the importance of phonics. Instead they advocated for doing both, a balance. And in balanced literacy, phonics is treated a bit like salt on a meal: a little here and there, but not too much, because it could be bad for you.
Seidenberg knows of a child who was struggling so much with reading that her mother paid for a private tutor. Your child was absent that day. For scientists like Seidenberg, the problem with teaching just a little bit of phonics is that according to all the research, phonics is crucial when it comes to learning how to read. Experts say that in a whole-language classroom, some kids will learn to read despite the lack of effective instruction.
Now they had to figure out what to do about it. The district leaders reasoned that the principals needed to be convinced of the science if they were going to convince their teachers to change the way they taught reading. If there was one principal who was sure to resist, it was Kathy Bast, the principal of Calypso Elementary School.
Education as a practice has placed a much higher value on observation and hands-on experience than on scientific evidence. But Bast had a secret. It was her job to help struggling readers. In her training to become a reading specialist, she learned a lot about how to identify children with reading problems, but she learned nothing about how to help those children learn to read.
With time on her hands while she was on medical leave, Bast began poking around online and discovered the vast scientific literature on reading. When Bast returned to work from medical leave and joined her fellow principals in the training on reading science, she was ready to hear what the trainer had to say.
And it kind of blew her mind. The principals went through the training in the school year, the kindergarten teachers went through it the next year, and then first- and second-grade teachers did it, too.
For many teachers, the science of reading training was overwhelming at first. Neither had Michelle Bosak, an English as a second language teacher at Lincoln. The teachers had no idea how kids actually learned to read. After learning about the reading science, these teachers were full of regret.
The Bethlehem schools now use a curriculum in the early elementary grades that mixes teacher-directed whole-class phonics lessons with small-group activities to meet the needs of children at different points in the process of learning to read. At first, some of the teachers recoiled a bit at the scripted nature of the lessons; the curriculum is explicit and systematic, with every teacher on the same page each day.
Now, because of the science of reading training, she knows better. At the end of each school year, the Bethlehem school district gives kindergartners a test to assess early reading skills. In , before the science of reading training began, more than half of the kindergartners in the district tested below the benchmark score, meaning most of them were heading into first grade at risk of reading failure.
At the end of the school year, after the principals and kindergarten teachers were trained in the reading science, 84 percent of kindergarteners met or exceeded the benchmark score. At three schools, it was percent. Silva is thrilled with the results, but cautious. Some of the schools in the district moved from half-day to full-day kindergarten the same year the training began, so that could have been a factor.
You can find schools and school districts across the United States that are trying to change reading instruction the way Bethlehem has, but according to Moats, ill-informed, ineffective reading instruction is the norm.
Education as a practice has placed a much higher value on observation and hands-on experience than on scientific evidence, Seidenberg said. Back in the early s, after the panel convened by Congress released its report, Butler and her colleagues wanted to know: Were teacher preparation programs in Mississippi instructing teachers to teach reading in ways backed up by the science?
The institute reviewed syllabi and textbooks, surveyed the students in the classes, observed some of the classes, and interviewed the deans and faculty. The study found that teacher candidates in Mississippi were getting an average of 20 minutes of instruction in phonics over their entire two-year teacher preparation program. Kelly Butler was alarmed. She and her colleagues went to state education officials and pleaded with them to take action.
In , in a rather extraordinary move, the state Department of Education mandated that every teacher preparation program in Mississippi require two courses in early literacy to cover what was in the National Reading Panel report. It was extraordinary because even though states have the authority to regulate teacher preparation programs, only a handful of states have specific requirements about what prospective teachers learn about reading.
Related: As Mississippi delivers bad news to 5, third graders, stressed-out parents say there must be a better way. And the whole language ones are not here because I think they would really resist, a lot. Angela Rutherford, who works with Butler and is a professor in the school of education at the University of Mississippi, put it more bluntly. There is a lot of ground to cover here and consistency is key.
While a lot of reinforcement will be required over the course of the year, research has shown that keeping a brisk pace through a phonics program achieves best results. You will be revisiting the material. Learning to read should be a positive experience, particularly as learning to read means acquiring one of the most empowering skills a child will ever have. To keep things fun, be sure to incorporate lots of enjoyable activities and games into your phonics lessons.
This perennial classic is a fun way to get some phonics practice in. If you wish to work on letter recognition rather than sound, simply hold up the letter itself quietly.
Sorting activities are a great way for students to practice their phonics knowledge and can take on an almost infinite number of variations. For example, younger kids may enjoy sorting objects into 2 hula hoops on the floor which are labeled with their initial consonant sounds, while older kids might work on consonant blends.
Bingo is another very versatile game that can be used to practice sound and letter recognition. These could be initial consonants, vowel digraphs, or pictures of nouns. If you set up some blank grids on laminated sheets, you can save yourself a lot of prep time too.
Simply write a broad selection of sounds you are working on onto the whiteboard. Students can select 9 of them to fill in their laminated grid. Now each student will have their own unique bingo card!
Partner reading is a great way to practice listening skills, as well as reading. Organize students into pairs and provide them each with a copy of the same text. One partner reads the text while the other follows closely with their own copy. The listening partner helps the reader decode difficult words when they have trouble. This usually works best when partners are of a similar ability. You can further differentiate here by choosing different texts to suit the abilities of each pair.
Shared writing is an effective means of introducing independent writing activities. For beginning students, it may take the form of simply spelling a basic CVC word together.
For example, to work on the spelling of the word cat , you could draw three cradles on the whiteboard and saying each sound, in turn, challenge the students to come up and write the corresponding letter in the cradle until they have written the word C — a — t. As we can see, the teaching of phonics is an extremely efficient and effective means of teaching our children to read and, ultimately, write.
It works on training students to be able to hear the various sounds of English, identify these sounds, and link these sounds to the symbols we call letters. The systematic presentation allows the child time to learn, master and practice skills. The later lessons include skills in reading multisyllable words that benefit many 2nd and 3rd graders. A helpful section on spelling is included at the end.
The key for reading success is not instruction at a very early age but rather effective instruction so the child develops correct phonologic processing pathways. While you do not need to start your preschooler on a structured reading program, you should be working to develop phonemic awareness skills.
See the article Phonemic Awareness Explained and the FAQ on Phonemic Awareness for additional information on how you can help your preschooler develop phonemic awareness. In conclusion, it is not necessarily early reading instruction but rather effective targeted instruction that specifically develops correct phonologic processing pathways that lead children to reading success.
Q: How long will it take for my child to complete this program? What sort of time commitment does the program require for me to teach my child to read? How long does it take to teach a child to read?
With the Right Track Reading Lessons program most children can be taught to read in a relatively short period of time. Obviously the more time you spend with your child the faster they will progress through the program. Also, as can be expected, time requirements to complete the program vary with age of the child and individual differences.
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