Reading

KINDERGARTEN READING GOALS:

First Sound Isolation (FSI)- These skills are your child's ability to identify sounds in spoken words. It is an indicator of how well your child can HEAR the FIRST SOUNDS. The assessor says a series of words one at a time to the student and asks the student to say the first sound in the word. Students receive 2 points for saying the initial phoneme of a word (e.g., saying the /s/ sound as the first sound in the word street) and 1 point for saying the initial consonant blend, consonant plus vowel, or consonant blend plus vowel (e.g., /st/, /str/, or /strea/ for street). The total score is based on the number of correct one- and two-point responses the student says in 1 minute. The goal is a score of 10 at the beginning of year and 30 by the middle of the year. FSF is not assessed at the end of the year.

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. PSF is assessed at the middle and end of year. The goal is 20 sounds for the middle of year and 40 sounds for 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 at middle and end of year. The goal 17 sounds in one minute for middle of year and 28 sounds for end of year.