Best Practices in Reading Instruction

Five Pillars of Reading Instruction:

·  Phonemic Awareness

·  Phonics/Decoding

·  Fluency

·  Vocabulary

·  Comprehension

READING COMPONENTS (courtesy, Dianne Craft, Child Diagnostics)

·  Eye tracking ability

(Have child strengthen eye convergence by doing an eye exercise daily, that crosses the body’s midline)

·  Sight word memorization

(Superimpose the meaning of the word on the sight word, using color, emotion and story.)

·  Phonics skills

(Superimpose the letter or phoneme on the picture that gives that sound. Read words with the phoneme in color, with the picture close by for handy reference)

·  Reading comprehension

(Help the child convert words into mental pictures for greater comprehension and retention by a fifteen minute daily training. Have the child look up while the teacher reads a passage. Stop after each sentence or two, and ask the child about his/her mental picture. If none, then describe your own picture, until this becomes easier)

Best Practices in Reading Instruction:
The general consensus of reading specialists, reading scholars, reading panels, reading teachers and others are as follows:
More / Less
Read aloud to students daily / Round-robin reading by students
Independent reading / Emphasis on whole-group reading
Use of trade books, picture books, magazines,
primary sources, poetry / Primary dependence on basal, textbook, literature book
Student choice of reading material / Teacher selection of reading material
Teacher modeling of skills and strategies / Lecturing, worksheets, workbooks
Content area reading (reading for real reasons) / Lecturing and worksheets
Use of higher-level questions (application, synthesis, evaluation) / Use of lower-level questions (primarily recall)
*Use of critical and creative thinking / *Less rote learning, memorization

Text Matters When Learning To Read:

·  Sight word readers

·  Decodable books (ex. Bob Books)

·  Leveled readers (for guided oral and guided silent reading)

·  Literature anthologies

·  Children’s classics

·  Bible

·  Poetry, songs, rhymes, and chants

·  Non-fiction/informational text (menus, maps, recipes, schedules, graphs/charts, reference materials

·  E-books and on-line sources

37 Common Rimes (“word families”) That Make Up Approximately 500 primary words:

--ack --eat --it

--ail --ell --ock

--ain --est --oke

--ake --ice --op

--ame --ick --ore

--an --ide --ot

--ank --ight --uck

--ap --ill --ug

--ash --in --ump

--at --ine --unk

--ate --ing --ale

--aw --ink

--ay --ip