Curriculum

Instruction in the reading support program focuses on the 5 most important parts of reading. In beginning reading instruction, the emphasis is mostly on phonemic awareness (the ability to hear and manipulate sounds,) and phonics and word analysis (how letters/sounds make words, including blending or putting together sounds, and segmenting or taking apart sounds in words.) As students become more confident in decoding words, more emphasis is placed on fluency (the ability to sound out and read words smoothly,) vocabulary, and beginning comprehension (what the story is about.)

Terms and labels that we use in my class:

  • Blending to the vowel--one of the hardest parts of learning to read is learning to do smooth blending. Many children learn "bumpy-blending" first. This is sound-by-sound blending (sun=s/u/n/.) If children don't move past this, their reading can be very choppy and laborious. Blending to the vowel means saying the first two sounds (consonant and vowel) together (sun=su/n) and then adding the ending sound ( another example: that=tha/t.)

  • "Band-aid"--we use a sticky note called a "band-aid" to cover the sounds past the vowel so that we only see the first two sounds and say them together smoothly (sun, cover the /n/ with the band-aid, say /su/ and pull off the band-aid and add the /n/ for sun.) If we don't have a sticky note, we use our index finger to cover the ending and call it our "band-aid finger."

  • "Alien words"--we say that the first two sounds of a word make an "alien word" because it doesn't make sense (sun=su/n.) The first part says /su/ which has no meaning and is therefore an alien word. When we add the ending /n/, we make a real word (su/n.) When a student is having trouble sounding out a word, I tell them to make the alien word first and this allows them to focus on just the two beginning sounds.

  • "Heart words" --heart words are words that have a tricky part that must be explicitly taught and remembered by heart. ( "Said" is a heart word because students have to remember the tricky part "ai" by heart. Students can usually identify the beginning and ending sounds /s/ and /d/ but the middle sound they hear is a short e, therefore often spelling the word s-e-d.)