Science of Reading

The Rio Rancho Public School District has made the Science of Reading a priority in our district, and it is research proven to be the pathway to literacy. In Kindergarten, this looks like a focus on teaching and practicing phonemic awareness, or the ability to hear and manipulate sounds at the tiniest level of a word without seeing print, and phonics, where you bridge sound and print. As we learn more about teaching reading, we know that learning to read is not a visual skill alone, but the science of putting together the visual representation with a sound. This means that we are focusing a great deal on the foundational skills of reading - rhyme, blending and segmenting compound words, and words at the syllable and phoneme (or sound) level. This will permeate what we do in reading and writing - we will focus on mapping sounds to letters in our students' brains explicitly. Teaching reading in this way will reach 95% of our students, and is a way to be proactive and preventative when it comes to student struggles. I want to introduce you to some things that you will see and hear from me in the next year and from other teachers beyond that. I know that we all joke that learning English is tricky because of all the exceptions to the rules, but in reality English is very predictable. Here is a fantastic, short article.

Some Helpful Vocabulary

Phoneme - the smallest representation of sound in a word, typically reserved for single letters. There are 44 phonemes in the English language.

Syllable - the smallest chunk of a word including a vowel sound. I usually teach kids to clap the vowel sounds. For example, pencil would be broken up pen-cil.

Onset/Rime - onset is the first phoneme or blend, and the rime is everything after and including the first vowel sound. For example, coat: c is the onset, and oat is the rime. Cloak: cl is the onset, and oak is the rime.

Compound words - a big word made up of two smaller words. For example, oatmeal is oat and meal.

Orthographic mapping - the important way that we teach students to spell any words, especially sight words. Please see the video embedded below for a good video regarding orthographic mapping.