...because every child deserves reading success.
Phonemic Awareness: A Prerequisite for Reading Success What is phonemic awareness and why do young readers need to develop it? It is important to develop phonemic awareness in emergent readers because it is an oral language skill that includes a number of discrete skills: rhyming isolating beginning, middle, and ending sounds segmenting and blending phonemes…
Phonemic Awareness is the awareness of the smallest sounds in speech. Like Phonological Awareness, Phonemic Awareness is an auditory skill. Phonemes refer to the smallest unit of sound within a word. For instance, “cat” has three phonemes: /k/ /a/ /t/. It is important to note that phonemes relate to the number of sounds, not letters,…
For many beginning and struggling readers who need to strengthen phonological awareness, instructional scaffolds are a necessity. In our previous post, we answered a lot of questions about instructional scaffolds. In this post, we delve more deeply into specific scaffolds used to strengthen phonological awareness. What is Phonological Awareness? Phonological Awareness is an auditory skill….
The first step in how to strengthen decoding skills is to connect phonemic awareness to print. In our previous post we discussed strengthening phonological awareness by incorporating targeted scaffolds (temporary assists). In that post, we focused on the oral aspect of phonemic awareness. However, it’s important to emphasize that research supports bridging the gap between…
What are instructional scaffolds? Instructional scaffolds are temporary tools that help students move from what they already know to what they cannot yet do on their own. Think of them as you would training wheels. A child may be able to ride a tricycle, but just doesn’t have the balance yet to ride a bicycle….
You know that assessing with leveled readers is just not giving you the information you need to help your students, but what is a teacher to do? The answer is to use decodable running records. Some folks are suggesting that running records are not a helpful assessment tool and teachers should not bother administering them….