- Phonemic Awareness
- Decoding & Blending
- Structural Analysis
Fluent reading takes practice, and therefore
the skill is honed slowly. Additionally, students do not develop fluency
until they have a solid foundation of word analysis skills. Most students
who cannot read fluently must put too much effort into decoding. They
read slowly, word for word, with unnatural phrase grouping, and this negatively
impacts comprehension. Other students recognize words automatically and
understand what they are reading, but their reading still lacks expression.
They may need to be taught the phrases and clauses that signal
appropriate breaking points in the text.
Sight Word Acquisition
The human brain looks for meaningful whole units and patterns. Since words are meaningful units, young readers soon begin to recognize them, regardless of the methods being utilized to teach them to read. During the primary grades, children continue to expand their repertoire of sight words. They are not learned as a result of specific lessons, but mastered over time (Dolch suggests three years). This section suggests strategies for speeding the acquisition of sight vocabulary.
Why is the Dolch 220 the most commonly used list of sight words? Certainly the longevity of Dolch's list attests to its value, even though there are some discrepancies. Dolch also developed a list of 95 nouns. It is more dated by time, with many of the nouns relating to a more rural lifestyle. Few nouns have the frequency of use of pronouns, articles, and other parts of speech. Those that do (i.e., thing, people) often appear in other high-frequency word lists.
Step 1 - Make flash cards or
Step 2 - Integrate sight words with phonics instruction
Step 3 - Use sight words to plan spelling lists and lessons
As students put the sentences together, their awareness of sentence structure improves. Without getting bogged down in terminology, they soon identify subjects and predicates; organize words into phrases; link adjectives and adverbs to the words they modify; and use conjunctions to provide cohesive ties. Scrambled sentences also model accurate capitalization and punctuation. Students learn to utilize these as organizational cues. Topics can teach facts that complement the curriculum and improve vocabulary.
1 - Select topics and gather resources
Step 2 - Write sentences and organize into levels
As you write the sentences, consider linguistic difficulty level. It is
important to make multilevel series. Each of these should have at least
ten sets. After students work through those, they develop skills that
enable them to succeed with longer, more complex sentences. One scrambled
sentence set from each Reading Manipulatives level is shown as an example
in the downloadable resource. Notice that sentence length and syntactical
sophistication increase in each level.