Ideal Reading Program For Fifth Grade

This has deepened my understanding of the big 5 concepts of literacy (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension) through understanding what criteria can be used to determinate what is effective developmental for a reader and what needs improvement. The Informal Reading Inventory is one example of this because it allows me to assess word recognition, oral and silent reading, comprehension, and literacy capacity. All of which is valuable information which I can then use as a reading teacher to determine further instructional moves. While I have yet to have a place to fully put these assessment techniques into my full practice as a first year teacher. Learning about how to properly assess these components has better equipped me to think about my students' literacy abilities and further strategize my instructional planning to meet the diversity of their literacy

There are many important components involved in learning to read, however, five main aspects stand out. These being early experiences with language and print, phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary and fluency. All of these elements are important and depend on each other to generate the ultimate goal for reading which is comprehension. Teachers need to have a comprehensive understanding of the process of learning to read, intensive knowledge of effective strategies to help children thrive when learning to read

Phonological awareness involves the detection and manipulation of sounds at three levels of sound structure: (1) syllables, (2) onsets and rimes, and (3) phonemes.

We chose to assess phonological awareness because it is a crucial component in children’s development of writing, spelling, and reading skills (Paul & Norbury, 2012). Phonological awareness refers to an individual’s awareness of the sound structure or words; it can be characterized by words, syllables, onset/rime, phoneme manipulations, and the ability to rearrange these different levels into various patterns.

Big Ideas Phonological Awareness: Phonological awareness is made up of various skills that help students work with our spoken language by manipulating sounds and oral parts of words. There will be students who pick up on phonological awareness very quickly and others that may need a lot of instruction and time in gaining the understanding of our spoken language. It is a foundational skill needed to be able to read and teachers need to make sure they give students support who struggle with phonological awareness so they have the skills needed to manipulate sounds and oral parts of words to begin reading. Decoding Words: Using the skills gained in phonological awareness, manipulating sounds and spoken parts of words, students can start using their knowledge of letter-sound relationships and the oral parts in words to start reading.

Even though advanced cochlear implant (CI) and hearing aid (HA) technology is making tremendous strides in the DHH community, these hearing devices still cannot completely restore normal hearing or fully represent all aspects of normal speech sounds. Therefore, children within this population are potentially at a higher risk for speech disorders, speech delays, or language difficulties. The acquisition of phonological awareness (PA) and PA abilities is an important developmental step in speech and language. Moreover, PA skills have been shown to significantly affect early literacy abilities in normal hearing children. PA is commonly defined as the conscious ability

To measure children’s phonological awareness, teachers should look at children’s ability with different skills. For example, a child with strong phonological awareness is able to understand and can use, alliteration, the concept of spoken word, rhyme, syllable blending and syllable segmenting. Children start to read by listening others, and then recognizing sound in words, sounding words out for themselves and recognizing familiar words, so it is important for children to learn the phonological awareness because it can help kids to become a successful reader.

Phonological awareness is when children learn to associate sounds with symbols and create links to word recognition and decoding skills. It consists of skills that develop through the preschool period. Phonological awareness is an important part of learning to read and write, children who have a broad range of phonics are able to identify and make oral rhymes, are able to clap out the syllables in a word and can recognise words with the same initial sounds. Phonological awareness is a good indicator whether your student will have a potential reading difficulty and with the many activities and resources available to us you can develop a child’s awareness early on in a child’s education.

Phonemic awareness is defined as the ability to distinguish sounds; a skill that allows you to listen for, count sounds, and identify distinct sounds. Letter naming isn’t included in phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness can be taught explicitly or indirectly through games, manipulatives activities, chanting, reading and sing along songs, or poems. Phonemic awareness is more than just recognizing sounds. It also includes the capability to hold on to those sounds, and blend them effectively into words, and take them apart again. Phonemic awareness is important for reading development because it’s the foundation you must overcome in order to get to the next stage of reading, and writing. Research of the NRP (National Reading Panel) says that during the kindergarten year, 18 hours of total of phonemic instruction- just 30 minutes week, six minutes a day- provided maximum advantage.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to manipulate the sounds in words orally (can be done in the dark; ORALLY). Words are made up of discrete set of sounds and it is important to be able to manipulate these sounds which is what phonemic awareness is. Sound isolation activities are good to help students gain phonemic awareness. Teachers can say a word and then have students identify the sounds at the beginning, middle, and end of the word. Sound-blending are also helpful for students to gain phonemic awareness. Teachers can provide a clue and then sound out each sound in a word and the student then has to pronounce the word.

Balanced literacy is seen as the truce in the reading wars that have developed in the educational community. Balanced literacy is the teacher’s ability to mix whole learning and phonics to create a reading atmosphere that will foster success in both comprehension and reading. Reading wars have always existed because reading is a critical skill needed in every aspect of a person’s life. Society often makes comments about the things learned in school that do not apply to real world from math to social studies to foreign languages but reading is needed in every aspect of life. A person cannot function in society if they are unable to read.

Phonics is described as “understanding letter-sound relationships, as well as larger letter pattern/sound pattern relationships” (Ruddell, 2009). Though in my opinion there is a lot more to phonics than this. There are several aspects to phonics, different types of phonics, negatives to the idea, and several ways to teach it. In this paper I will address all of these based on research I found, the discussion I had with my peers, and my own opinion.

To enhance my content knowledge on phoneme awareness, I chose to read the article, “Tell me about Fred’s Fat Foot Again: Four Tips for Successful PA Lessons,” from the Reading Teacher journal, written by Bruce A. Murray. In the article, Bruce shares four research-based techniques that have been proven to enhance students’ phoneme awareness. The four techniques are: introducing a limited group of phonemes one at a time, making phonemes memorable and helping them learn the phonemes vocal boundaries, providing phenome-finding practice so that children learn to detect the phoneme in spoken-word contexts and applying phoneme knowledge to partial alphabetic decoding equipping students to read words.

The phonological system is described as the system of sound. Phonological awareness is an understanding that words are composed of sound units, and that sound unit can be combined to form words. It is during this process that children learn the sounds and dialect of a language. Additionally, phonological awareness is an auditory-based set of skills that allows children to move from speech to reading. Therefore, when a child is learning to read, they can break down words into

Effective reading instruction provides children with the key skills and strategies they require. Children also depend upon the opportunity to read a range of interesting text to apply their knowledge. For children to become competent readers educators must explicitly and systematically teach the required skills and strategies. To build children’s confidence in these skills and strategies educators need to provide plenty of opportunity for children to read independently texts that interest them. Effective reading instruction includes the development of skills such as concepts of print, punctuation, grammar, phonics, phonological awareness, and vocabulary, along with comprehension and fluency strategies. These key concepts can be developed through shared, guided and independent reading instruction. For educators to give every child an equal opportunity to become competent readers they must be flexible and understand what instruction each child requires.