Even if they had been able to w rite, pens and ink and paper w ould have been luxuries that few could afford.

M ost slaves could neither read nor write; and m any w hite A m ericans, acting according to law and custom , pre­vented the slaves from learning to read or write.

oral history has been dism issed by a younger generation

Fred­erick Douglass

n the Writing portion of the balanced literacy block, teachers scaffold their instruction along the continuum of teacher directedness so that students are increasingly responsible for demonstrating their ability to use writing skills and strategies. Similar to quality reading instruction, excellent writing instruction begins with the teacher modeling a skill or process, moves to the teacher guiding students to use those skills or processes, and culminates in students writing independently. The purposes of writing instruction are:

During Independent Reading, students put all that they’ve learned about decoding and comprehension into action as they choose and read books on their independent level

Creating Literacy Centers.

Guided Reading can serve a variety of purposes, depending on the needs of students:

In order for students to increase their literacy skills, teachers should consider the following when planning and conducting Shared Reading

Shared Reading has several purposes:

Teachers who lead effective and purposeful Read Aloud plan and execute them with the following in mind

An effective Read Aloud has several instructional purposes, with some variance by grade level. These purposes include

e that the context in which students learn and practice comprehension strategies differs

writing instruction so that they model excellent writing for students, share the pen with students during Shared and Interactive Writing, and conference with students as they write independentl

Read Aloud, read with students during Shared Reading and Guided Reading, and listen to and assess students’ reading during Independent Reading.

Buddy Reading

Repeated readingis one of the most effective ways to offer lots of practice to students; this instructional method has been proven to help students recall information from their reading, improve their comprehension, increase their reading rates, and change from word-by-word reading to reading with meaningful phrases

By pointing to each word as you are reading, you can show students where and how you are pausing and how the text shows you when to raise and lower your voice. Occasionally, you can also explain to your students why you are reading in a certain way:

The more that students hear a reader using appropriate phrasing, reading quickly and accurately, and using expression in his or her voice, the more quickly students will understand what fluent reading actually is.

fluency is the bridge that takes readers from simply decoding words to understanding and enjoying whole texts.

reading fluency is the ability to read a text quickly, accurately, and with expressio

it is important that correct information be transmitted in the classroom. If we allow errors to go uncorrected, the remainder of the class either thinks you did not hear the mistake or thinks what the student said was correct.

Remember that we teach students these meaningful word parts to increase their stock of information so that they will be able to make intelligent choices when decoding and pronouncing unfamiliar words

Kindergarten students should read and hear lots of nursery rhymes, common songs, and poems

Kindergarten students need to learn to discriminate categories of sounds

One of the first tasks of school is to show students how books work. Throughout Kindergarten and first grade, teachers constantly review the elements of books and the concepts of print

Explicit and systematic phonics instruction is the most efficient and effective way to teach students to decode, and thus to read independently.

Remember that our explanations of these spelling patterns are suited to the learning capacities of adults, not children.

This is the basis for the familiar old phonics rule, “when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking

Many sounds can be spelled in multiple ways, and some graphemes (letters or letter combinations) can represent more than one sound.

iphthongs are sounds produced when the mouth moves from one formation to another within a single syllable.

Now that you know which consonant sounds are likely to be confused, you can be on the lookout for students who struggle to hear or articulate them. Help students to “feel” how sounds are different by thinking about the different speech organs that are used to make each one

The Groupsof phonemes cannot be as easily distinguished as the pairs, but there is a clear logic to their grouping. The nasalsinclude consonant phonemes that are produced by exhaling all of the air through your nose. All of the nasal sounds are voiced; you can feel the vibration of the vocal chords through the nose if you hold a finger beside your nose.

Some of these are stop pairs, meaning that the production of the sound completely stops the flow of air through the mouth at some point.

We all know that English is comprised of consonants and vowels, but many of us may be unaware that this classification has nothing to do with the letter symbols per se, but instead what our speech organs do to produce the sound.

Understanding how our mouths work as we pronounce soundshelps us to listen and watch our students more critically. In a room of children reading chorally, it’s easy to spot those who cannot decode or articulate by the formation of their mouths

Once you know the precise method of articulating these sounds, you will be able to provide explicit corrective feedback to improve students’ phonological awareness and phoneme production.

As a writer of English, you may occasionally refer to spelling conventions (such as “i before e, except after c”) but probably generally rely upon memory and constant repetition to cue spelling patterns.

George Bernard Shaw once ridiculed the English language by saying that you could spell fish GHOTI, using the gh in rough, the o in women, and the ti in caution.

This chapter will also show you how to assist students so far below grade level that the word study content of your program’s lessons is effectively unintelligible to them.

Most reading programs are written by highly skilled educators with extensive knowledge of the English language and of current research. Unfortunately, their teachers’ manuals do not explain why the word study activities they require are effective or how they match the linguistic underpinnings of our language

Writing Workshops

Vocabulary, background knowledge, and the use of comprehension strategies all impact how well we understand what we read.

Research has shown that students who can read with accuracy and fluency are better able to comprehend the material because they are spending the majority of their time thinking about the text and not deciphering the words.

Have students read the same passage repeatedly to improve rate and accuracy Monitor and track speed and accuracy

For example, students who encounter the word “ungrateful” will be able to decode it quickly if they can recognize the words’ three meaningful parts (its prefix, root, and suffix) and comprehend it easily if they understand the meaning of each part.

To this end, the teaching of both phonological and phonemic awareness and phonics and the alphabetic principle are very important in Kindergarten. In the phonological

Thus, one key task of the kindergarten teacher is to build students’ motivation to read books by building their foundational reading skills and exposing them to a wide variety of texts through the Read Aloud.

“First grade is the time when children bring together the many language and literacy skills they have been attaining—book and print awareness, phonemic awareness, letter and word knowledge, background information about different topics—and start getting comfortable with the conventions of associating letters and sounds.

For many children, first grade is the time when they move from “pretend reading” to conventional reading

Unfortunately, disparate quality of past literacy instruction begins to evidence itself quite dramatically in second and third grade

Third grade students learn to write in cursive

Excellent teachers of literacy recognize the high returns that come from careful and constant assessment of their students’ literacy skills.

One of the most profound and personal connections that young children make to print involves their names. The presence of students’ names in several locations around the elementary classroom (on classroom management charts, reading group lists, classroom job boards, etc.) is of great importance as an instructional tool for new readers.

Without quick, accurate reading, comprehension is near impossible. We simply cannot focus on understanding a story if we must spend all of our time decoding the words on the page

word and structural analysis skills.

phonics and the alphabetic principle

phonological and phonemic awareness

book and print awareness,

beginning readers who receive explicit, systematic phonics instruction and practice decoding simple words and reading easy books will eventually find that their ability to decode has become so automatic that they have to expend little cognitive energy on the process.

children master the important skills, strategies, and knowledge they need to become successful readers and writers most quickly and effectively if their teachers integrate both systematic instruction in letter-sound relationships and critical thinking about literature in to their literacy classrooms Researchers and educators often refer to this multi-faceted approach as “balanced literacy” instruction.

The emphasis on teaching students to recognize whole words automatically and to use clues to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words became known as the whole language approach.

A landmark study conducted at the University of Kansas examined the exposure to verbal language of children in several socio-economic settings and found a dramatic difference in the total number of words heard by children at the high end of the socio-economic scale (45 million words over four years) and the children in the lowest sector of the socio-economic scale (13 million). All children will show up for Kindergarten on the same day, but one may have heard 32 million fewer words in his or her lifetime, a fact that will almost certainly affect how quickly a child can decode and understand words.9 Clearly, environmental factors—including those at play before children ever arrive at school—have an enormous impact on students’ literacy development.

the literacy skills of students in the under-resourced schools where we teach often lag well behind those of children in wealthier areas.

Young, capable readers will seize the opportunities provided in a literacy-infused classroom and develop invaluable confidence in their own abilities, which leads directly to success in other subjects such as social studies, math, and science.

children who read well in the early grades are far more successful in later school years

No single method of intervention will have as dramatic an effect on a student’s future learning and success than a solid foundation in literacy.

, it is essential that elementary teachers follow the constant cycle of diagnosis, instruction, and assessment that is the crucible of excellent instruction

Perhaps the most obvious benefit of such an initial diagnosis is that it shows you where to begin your instruction.

Phonological Awareness Tests.

Finally, you can ask individual students to read from a Word List, which contains short lists of progressively more challenging words. When a student says a word incorrectly or skips it, the teacher records that as a “miscall.”

As the name implies, this assessment approach requires students to retell a story to the teacher that the student has read. By recording what aspects of the story the child recognizes and retells, the teacher establishes a picture of the student’s literacy skills.

To measure a student’s fluency (also called oral reading rate), you would conduct a Timed Reading Exercise with a text on this student’s independent reading level

Most teachers—even at the kindergarten and first grade level—find that rubrics are an invaluable tool.

They use graphic organizers, story maps and outlining techniques to teach students the form and structure of various genres of text.

Running records, which are useful for students of all grade levels, do not have to be complicated.

Running records, which are useful for students of all grade levels, do not have to be complicated.

some teachers use the “five finger rule,” where the student is asked (and taught, so he can use this method to choose texts he reads on his own) to read an approximately 100-word passage and put up a finger every time he comes across a word he can’t read. If he puts up fewer than five fingers, the text is at his independent level and he will be able to read it and comprehend it without assistance from the teacher; the process of doing so will also build his fluency, due to the repeated exposure to words he already knows.

lassroom Snapshot: Word Study

Improve students’ ability to hear sounds by working with rhymes, riddles, and stories;

print awareness

second grade, Ms. Cleary’s students build their comprehension during the Read Aloud and in Shared Reading. During these times, students are listening to a book read to them or are supported by the voices of other fluent readers; thus, their cognitive energy is freed to think strategically about the texts. In fourth grade, however, students are able to use comprehension strategies during Independent Reading; for most students, decoding has become an automatic process. The fourth graders with weak decoding skills (Clayton, Shawnice, and Troy) listen to a book on tape during this time to improve their reading fluency and also attend Mr. Moreno’s small group for additional instruction in troublesome spelling patterns.

Phonological and phonemic awareness

Reading Habits Checklist.

develop your students’ prior knowledge by allowing them to share their knowledge of the subject and giving the class important information they will require to make sense of the text.

frustration levels of your students

prefix, root, and suffix

Understanding the function of print and the characteristics of books and other print materials

One of the most profound and personal connections that young childre

honics (decoding words by examining relationships between sounds and letters)

absence of literacy skills is one of the key indicators of the achievement ga

more than 74% of children who enter first grade at risk for reading failure will continue to struggle to read into adulthood.3 Weak literacy skills will prohibit these children from accessing entire fields of knowledge

absence of literacy skills is one of the key indicators of the achievement gap

absence of literacy skills is one of the key indicators of the achievement ga

it's another thing entirely to observe a ten year old who can only read 40 words per minute at the beginning of fourth grade, when he should be reading over 100

dramatic difference in the total number of words heard by children at the high end of the socio-economic scale (45 million words over four years) and the children in the lowest sector of the socio-economic scale (13 millio

dramatic difference in the total number of words heard by children at the high end of the socio-economic scale (45 million words over four years) and the children in the lowest sector of the socio-economic scale (13 million

Upon encountering a word that had not been taught, children were told to use picture or context clues to determine its meaning.

Upon encountering a word that had not been taught, children were told to use picture or context clues to determine its meaning.

bothdecoding and comprehension processes

by reading books on their independent level and thinking about more challenging books that are read aloud to them.

mental energy can be used to read and comprehend increasingly complex words and texts.

What Is Literacy?

Phonological Awareness: Understanding that the spoken language is made up of units of sounds, such as sentences, words, and syllables

ntain both syllables and individual sounds, or phonemes. They should be able to hear and produce rhyming and alliteration, as well as begin to segment and blend simple words (to break the word cat down into the sounds /c... a... t/ and put those sounds together again to say cat). Students should also be able to recognize, name, and easily write the individual letters of the alphabet (both capital and lowercase), and know their corresponding sounds

Children become, in a real sense, independent readers.

diagnosing your students’ abilities and progress is a necessary foundation for achieving the significant academic gains that your students must make in order to catch up with students in more privileged communities

First grade is the time when children bring together the many language and literacy skills they have been attaining—book and print awareness, phonemic awareness, letter and word knowledge, background information about different topics—and start getting comfortable with the conventions of associating letters and sounds

pre-writing strategies

common roots, prefixes, and suffixes)

A close look at this graphic shows us that our ability to decode—to translate individual letters or various combinations thereof into speech sounds to identify and read words—is built upon our book and print awareness, phonological and phonemic awareness, phonics and the alphabetic principle, and word and structural analysis skills. Our ability to comprehend—to actively read and understand language—is based on our background knowledge, vocabulary, and ability to use comprehension strategies. Finally, our ability to read fluently—with speed, accuracy, and expression—is dependent on our ability to read non-decodable words on “sight,” to decode with such automaticity that we spend no mental energy in the process, and to read with appropriate phrasing. Reading fluency is the bridge from decoding to comprehension, hence its placement in the graphic.

We simply cannot focus on understanding a story if we must spend all of our time decoding the words on the page

Most teachers develop students’ Book and Print Awareness through constant, explicit modeling. When they hold up a Big Book that the class is reading, they “think aloud” about how to hold the book, where to start reading, and in what direction. While a teacher is writing the morning news on the board for his first graders, he might ask the students, “Should I start at the top of the board or the bottom?”

Understanding that the spoken language is made up of units of sounds, such as sentences, words, and syllables

Understanding that spoken words are made up of individual phonemes (the smallest part of spoken language); being able to hear, identify, and manipulate those phonemes

need

Discussions of new words that occur during the course of the day, for example in books

Beginning readers should be able to read easily 90 percent or more of the words in a story

Print represents oral language Reading from left to right and top to bottom Spaces between words and sentences Standard text structures and organization, such as covers, backs, titles, and illustrations Specific genre structures and organization, such as table of contents and index Sentence structure How to hold a book, turn its pages, and shelve it

Phonemic awareness is the recognition of distinct phonemes, or speech sounds, in words. For example, the word squished is composed of the phonemes /s/, /k/, /w/, /i/, /sh/, and /t/.

Once they figured out what letter or letter combinations made that particular sound, we decoded practice words with our cool new symbols.

A]ll students, regardless of which language(s) is (are) spoken, must develop an awareness of phonology and syntax if they are to become literate. . . . The development of listening comprehension is also a necessary condition for reading readines

This instruction begins in Kindergarten with the dictation of stories to correspond to children’s illustrations. The child first attempts to use the letters he or she is learning to label pictures independently. Then he or she moves on to early elementary grades, where he or she should learn sentence structure, parts of speech, and how to develop paragraphs with topic sentences and details on a variety of topics. Finally, in upper elementary grades, the child learns to complete full compositions of different styles targeted to different audiences.