PDF THE SOURCE: A Curriculum Guide for Reading Mentors

THE SOURCE:

A Curriculum Guide for

Reading Mentors

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART 1 Ideas for Building Readers

Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten

How Do Children Become Readers? What Research Tells Us About Struggling Readers Meeting the Needs of Struggling Readers Phonemic Awareness: The Foundation for Phonics Skills Phonics and Decoding Skills Building Fluency Word Building for Increasing Vocabulary Comprehension: The Reason for Learning to Read Finding Appropriate Reading Materials Individual Assessments

PART 2 PLANNING Resources for Intervention Sessions

Tutoring Session LESSON 1-30 Routines

Individual Assessment Forms

Nonsense Word Test Sight-Word Proficiency Assessment Oral Reading Fluency Passage

Mentoring Lesson Plans

Student Survey Poems: Eighteen Flavors and Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Independent Reading Chart Student Book List Form Reciprocal Teaching Chart Word Web Phonogram Speed Drill Blank Speed Drill Syllable Bingo Word Search Racetrack Game Spin It!

BIBLIOGRAPHY

THE SOURCE: A Curriculum Guide for Reading Mentors

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Part 1

IDEAS FOR BUILDING READERS

CHAPTER ONE

HOW DO CHILDREN BECOME READERS?

"At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book --- that string of confused, alien ciphers --- shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader."

All children deserve the promise that books hold. Whether they transport us to another world, make us laugh or cry, teach us something new, or introduce us to people we wouldn't otherwise meet, we are thankful for their gifts. In turn, all children deserve the gift of reading. And as educators, we bear the responsibility and honor of delivering that gift. Students come to school with a wide range of reading skills and ability levels. Some have mastered most of the skills they'll need to decode and comprehend more complex text; others still struggle with the most basic and critical skills. Your task --- and challenge --- is to help these students to face the demands of texts filled with new and long words and complex ideas.

This guidebook is designed to help you better understand our complex language to improve and expand students' reading skills. Your students will gain insights into our fascinating language, get excited about words, and become fluent readers. You'll help them to develop a passion for books and an understanding of how books can provide pleasure and information.

With reading as one of the mot important skills for children to learn, what should be the primary goals of reading instruction? These goals are often mentioned:

1. Automatic word recognition (fluency) 2. Comprehension of text 3. Development of a love of literature and desire to read

The first of these goals --- automatic word recognition --- is one of the greatest challenges for students in learning to read. To become skilled readers, students must be able to identify words quickly and accurately. And to do that, they must be proficient at decoding words. Decoding words involves converting the printed word into spoken language. A reader decodes a word by sounding it out by using structural analysis and syllabication techniques, or recognizing the word by sight. In order to sound out words, a reader must be able to associate a specific spelling with a specific sound. Phonics involves this relationship between sounds and their spellings.

Approximately 84% of English words are phonetically regular. Therefore, teaching the most common sound-spelling relationships in English is extremely useful to readers. One of the early hurdles in helping children to read is helping them to understand that the series of symbols that we call the alphabet

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maps out the sounds of our language in some predictable ways. This is a key insight into early reading. And it enables children to get off to a quick start in relating sounds to spellings in order to decode words.

Once children grasp this key insight and learn the most common soundspellings that they meet in the earlier grades, their next hurdle involves decoding multisyllabic words. Some older students find it extremely difficult to read these words. They can't recognize common spelling patterns or larger chunks of the words that may help in sounding them out. And many more of the words in the books they're now reading are new to them, are not familiar to them. These words are not in their vocabulary. Discovering the meanings of these unfamiliar words is critical to understanding the meaning of what they read. Learning advanced phonics skills helps. For example, one important way to determine a word's meaning is by understanding the meanings of prefixes and root words. There are significant differences between the word "relevant" and "irrelevant," "play" and "playful."

Comprehension is certainly the most important part of reading. But how does the ability to decode words help a reader understand text? The chart below shows that strong decoding ability is necessary for reading comprehension.

Phonics instruction helps the reader to map out the sounds onto their spellings. Students must have phonemic awareness skills in order to match sounds to their spellings. Decoding words helps to develop and improve word recognition. The more words one recognizes, the easier the reading task. Therefore, phonics instruction aids in the development of word recognition by providing children with an important and useful way to figure out unfamiliar words while reading.

When children begin to be able to recognize a large number of words quickly and accurately, reading fluency improves. As it becomes easier and easier for the student to recognize more and more words, he or she gains fluency and becomes automatic and makes less reading errors.

Reading fluency improves reading comprehension. Since children are no longer struggling with decoding words, they can devote their full attention to constructing meaning while they read the text. As the vocabulary and concept demands increase in text, children need to be able to devote more of their attention to making meaning from text, and increasingly less attention to decoding. If children have to devote too much time to decoding words their reading will be slow and labored. This will result in comprehension problems. The final result is that the student will not want to read.

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THE SOURCE: A Curriculum Guide for Reading Mentors

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