Each day students receive  90 minutes of reading instruction as part of a larger literacy block.  This time is broken down into two major categories of instruction: Whole-Group and Small-Group.  During whole group instruction students participate in activities such as a phonics lesson, reading aloud of the week's main story, vocabulary activities, and lessons in comprehension.  During small group activities students meet with teachers in small groups that are designed to provide instruction based on student's individual reading needs.  While some students are meeting with the teacher, the rest of the class is involved in Work Stations.  A Work Station is a group of independent activities that focus on a specific reading skill.  These activities vary from week to week depending on the skills covered in whole-group and small-group instruction.  These stations also include activities that differ in order to meet a the varying degree of difficulty that each student is ready for at a given time.

The five main components of reading instruction, or the "Fab Five" are phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.  Development in each of these areas is important to your child's overall reading progress.  Phonemic Awareness refers to your child's ability to recognize different sounds and how they are put together and taken apart to make words.  Phonics is different from phonemic awareness because it refers to any activity in which a student connects sounds to something in writing.  Vocabulary instruction focuses on developing an understanding of word meanings and how they relate a message.  Fluency includes developing reading abilities such as appropriate rate or speed, reading phrases or "chunks" of words, and the use of expression to name a few.  And finally, Comprehension or understanding what is read is the overall goal of reading.  Instruction in comprehension includes many areas and skills.  Some of these include cause and effect relationships, fact and opinion, making judgments, predicting and inferring, questioning, story structure, and fantasy vs. realism.  Some of the skills instruction focuses on are Evaluation, Monitoring and Clarifying what is read, Summarizing and Retelling, and Decoding or identifying word parts and producing a spoken word.

While 90 minutes a day seems like a lot of time spent on reading, there is no substitute for time spent enjoying a good book.  Research shows that students who read on their own for pleasure generally have higher reading achievement.  Since reading is such an important part of education today it should have a strong place in the home as well as in school.  Therefore it is very important to build good reading habits  and continue reading for the 180 Book Campaign.

Reading Standards
Coming Soon!