Essential Components of Reading

Emergent readers should be taught phonics, fluency, alphabet knowledge, phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, and concepts of print.

• The concepts of print are essential when teaching children to read. I plan to teach my students that text carries the message, letters are the black squiggles on the page, text goes from the left page and then proceeds to the right, reading of text goes from left to right and top to bottom, and that a story has a beginning, middle, and end.
  
• In my classroom, I will teach alphabet knowledge by using key words and pictures when introducing books, music, and websites. I plan to teach the letter names first, then the shapes of the letters and sound, and provide letter-writing practice. I plan to assess alphabet knowledge by using a Letter Naming Test, which is where I ask students to identify the names of the uppercase and lowercase letters. I would ask students to identify the letters in and out of sequence next.
  
• Phonological Awareness is awareness of words at the phoneme level and of word units larger than the phoneme. In my classroom, I plan to use a fun approach by using playful music. I plan to assess this by letting children show me that they can identify and make oral rhymes, identify and work with syllables, identify and work with onset and rimes, and identify and work with individual phonemes in spoken words.

• Phonemic Awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual phonemes in spoken words. I plan to model appropriate phoneme sounds and illustrate blending and segmenting using sound boxes. I also plan to teach phonemic awareness during small group instruction. I will teach children to notice, think about, and work with sounds in spoken language. I plan to asses students by asking them to identify phonemes, categorize phonemes, blend phonemes to form words, segment words into phonemes, delete or add phonemes to form new words, and to substitute phonemes to make new words.

• Alphabetic principle is the knowledge that a specific letter or letter combinations represent each of the phonemes. In my classroom, I plan to teach the alphabet letters and sounds they represent. I plan to use the names of the students as a way to introduce the alphabet and discuss the letters. I plan to use environmental print. I plan to assess children by asking them to name letters that are shown to them, pronounce letter sounds, and choose the letters that have specific names and sounds.

• Phonics shows how spellings relate to speech sounds in systematic and predictable ways. Phonics is important because it leads to an understanding of the alphabetic principle. In my classroom, I plan to model working with words and segment during the day.

• Fluency is the ability to read accurately and quickly.I plan to model fluency during the read-aloud everyday and teach it with a variety of genre and levels. I plan to guide student’s reading in small and large group and give them feedback. I also plan to provide time for teacher-monitored independent reading in a book at the instructional level. I plan to assess fluency by listening, using a rubric, and using a timed passage.

I will assess reading concepts to inform my teaching, communicate student progress, and evaluate my teaching strategies. I also want to see what my students cannot do, but also what they can do.