First Grade

GRADE 1 READING GOALS:

Letter Naming Fluency (LNF)-is your child's ability to IDENTIFY upper and lower case letters in any order. It is an indicator of your child's knowledge of the letters of the alphabet. There is no formal benchmark goal for LNF. The letters are presented in random order of uppercase, lowercase, and different print/font styles.

Phonemic Segmentation Fluency (PSF)-is your child's ability to segment three- and four- phoneme words into their individual phonemes fluently. For example, if the assessor says "sat", and the student says "/s/ /a/ /t/" he or she receives 3 possible points for the word. After the student responds, the assessor presents the next word, and the number of correct phonemes produced in one minute determines the final score. The goal is 40 sounds for the beginning of first grade. PSF is not assessed again at middle and end of year.

Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF)-is your child's ability to KNOW the letters and sounds in written words. It is an indicator of how well your child knows the sounds of the letters or is able to blend sounds into words. For example, if the stimulus word is "pov" the student could say /p/ /o/ /v/ or say the word /pov/ to obtain a total of three letter-sounds correct. The student is allowed 1 minute to produce as many letter-sounds as he/she can, and the final score is the number of letter-sounds produced correctly in one minute. Because the measure is fluency based, students should receive a higher score if they are phonologically recoding the word, as they will be more efficiently producing the letter sounds, and receive a lower score if they are providing letter sounds in isolation. The intent of this measure is that students are able to read unfamiliar words as whole words, not just name letter sounds as fast as they can. NWF is assessed 3 times per year in first grade. The goal is 27 sounds per minute at beginning of year, 43 for middle of year, and 58 for end of year.