Phonemic Awareness skills are a set of foundational reading skills that involve orally identifying and manipulating sounds within words. Phonemic awareness skills strongly correlate to reading development. Phonemic awareness skills include the following:
The goals of phonics and word study instruction are to teach children that there are systematic relationships between letters and sounds, that written words are composed of letter patterns representing the sounds of spoken words, that recognizing words quickly and accurately is a way of obtaining meaning from them, and that they can blend sounds to read words and segment words into sounds to spell.
Skill Set:
1. Letter recognition and mastery of letter-sound correspondence
2. Blending and segmenting letter sounds and sound units to decode and encode words
3. Recognizing word families (_at, _in) to read by association (If you can read cat, you can read rat)
4. Sight word mastery: reading and spelling
5. Using decoding strategies to break apart or "chunk" unfamiliar words
Fluency is defined as the ability to read with speed, accuracy, and proper expression. In order to understand what they read, children must be able to read fluently whether they are reading aloud or silently. When reading aloud, fluent readers read in phrases and add intonation appropriately. Their reading is smooth and has expression.
Understanding and using words to acquire and convey meaning.
Reading comprehension refers to a student's ability to understand what they are reading and use that information to expand upon their thinking by: