Reading

Students in Naugatuck Public Schools experience a balanced literacy approach to reading and reading instruction. Our approach is multi-tiered and individualized to a students' needs and interests, and focused on five areas of reading: comprehension, vocabulary, spelling, phonics and phonemic awareness, and fluency.

Programs and Instructional Approaches

Words Their Way

This word study program is a developmental spelling, phonics and vocabulary approach based on research. Students enter the program at their own developmental level and are then provided differentiated, efficient instruction to build their skills. They advance through the program's stages of development and instructional levels that are aligned to the way students learn to read.

Words Their Way provides skill-based instruction that focuses on examining and manipulating words, not memorizing them. Students will think more critically about words not only as they work within the program, but as they use their new skills to read and write.

Words Their Way will focus on teaching students how to spell, decode new words, and improve word recognition speed. Teachers demonstrate and model how to examine words and identify the patterns that exist in spelling. Students are also exposed to irregular words that don't fit a pattern. The process of sorting words into categories is the heart of word study. When students sort words, they are actively searching, comparing, contrasting, and analyzing. Word sorts help students organize what they know about words and to form generalizations that they can then apply to new words they encounter in their reading.

www.teachingchannel.org/video/guided-reading-introduction

Guided Reading

Naugatuck uses the research of Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell to structure guided reading as an essential component to reading instruction. Teachers work with small groups of students who exhibit similar reading behaviors and read texts at similar levels. Students are matched with texts that provide opportunities for students to use strategies to decode text, tackle complex sentence structure, and make sense of concepts and ideas that they have necessarily encountered in text before.

A guided reading approach is interactive, where the teacher works with students to build their fluency and their comprehension, and deliver "just in time" instruction. This responsive teaching model gives teachers insight and information into a student's ability to decode, make sense of, and interpret text, and plan instruction according to his or her needs as a reader. Teachers are continually balancing the difficulty of the text with the supports students will need to read.

Typically, teachers will introduce a group to a text, individualize support through short, focused interactions while students are reading, and guide students afterward in talking about the words, ideas, and concepts in the text. This critical interaction with students allows the teacher to make informed, timely decisions about text and move individual students forward as they develop their reading process.

Good readers can select from and use a wide range of strategies, including analysis of sound-letter relationships, word parts, comprehension, and sense making. Reading a variety of literature enables our students to go beyond reading individual words to interpreting language and its subtle meanings.

Our teachers use The Literacy Continuum by Fountas and Pinnell to structure and plan reading lessons.

Readers (and Writer's) Workshop

Our teachers are implementing a workshop approach to learning that includes centers, independent reading, and mini lessons that target a very specific skill, whether it be in reading or writing. This model, based on the work of Lucy Calkins and Teacher's College at Columbia University.

Students first engage with their teacher in a mini lesson, which is targeted to a specific skill or concept that the teacher has identified through the exploration of student work and student thinking. A mini lesson typically lasts 10-15 minutes and allows the teacher to introduce the skill and practice that skill with students before sending them off - either independently or in partners/groups, to practice that skill with the text they are currently reading.

The teacher will then conference with students as they work on developing the skill, offering individualized support. These conferences are essential to how teachers know where students are in their understanding and plan for future learning.

This instructional model is an approach Naugatuck Public Schools is continually developing and refining.

Scholastic Comprehension Clubs

Grades K-4 and 7-8 use Scholastic's Comprehension Clubs embedded within the Humanities curriculum to provide students with connected, choice-based reading. Developed by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell - leading reading researchers - Comprehension Clubs promote deep reading and rich conversation.

Comprehension Clubs are framed with themes that span K-8:

Community and Relationships
Folklore and Literary Tradition
Living Things
A Sense of Self
Inspired by True Stories
Genre Study

These themes are thoughtfully and purposefully connected to our Humanities themes of Change and Consequence, Power and Dominance, and Culture and Identity. They work through and with our Social Studies framework to provide students with meaningful, personal experiences that help them build the skills, knowledge and understanding essential to their learning.

These book clubs include interactive read-alouds that set the tone and the target for learning and connect to the independent reading they will engage in with peers. Students have choices of which books to read, and work collaboratively with peers to create meaning and understanding through the use of reading strategies.

"Through reflective, academic conversation about books—the hallmark of the Common Core Standards (2010)—teachers and students create the vibrant, literate classroom community that best supports high level, quality comprehension. The collaborative, interactive nature of the book club enables all students—including struggling readers and English Language Learners—to find the support they need to fully engage with the books." (Fountas and Pinnell, 2006, 2012; Duke, Pearson, Strachan, & Billman, 2011)

Naugatuck Public Schools uses Comprehension Clubs as a feature of its Humanities curriculum and its instructional approach.

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