Reading comprehension is the product of decoding skills and language comprehension:
Decoding skills X Language comprehension = Reading Comprehension.
To help children become excellent readers and writers, parents and other educators must create the conditions that encourage them to take the following six steps every day which build decoding and language comprehension skills.
The Steps To Reading Comprehension Success
Decoding skills X Language comprehension = Reading Comprehension.
To help children become excellent readers and writers, parents and other educators must create the conditions that encourage them to take the following six steps every day which build decoding and language comprehension skills.
The Steps To Reading Comprehension Success
- Develop Phonemic awareness. This is the process by which children learn how to distinguish the distinct sounds that we use to create all of the spoken words in our language. Children learn to recognize these 44 spoken sounds or phonemes by listening interactively to stimulating poems, rhymes, stories, and conversations.
- Learn to read, spell, and write phonetically by decoding and translating printed words into spoken sounds.
- Learn how to read fluently by rehearsing and imitating the rhythms, words, and syntactic structures or the prosody of decodable stories and complex literature. Students should practice prosody through repetition and performance. They develop excellent stress, tempo, intonation, and rhythm (STIR) through (RAP) rapid, automatic, precise recognition of words and grammatical structures. When students develop a rapid, accurate, precise way to know how to pronounce words and to know what those words might mean, they can focus on reading articulately with passion, confidence, and understanding. Fluency is crucial to comprehension. To read fluently, students have to know how to say the words, what the words mean, and how to chunk and read them as grammatical units instead of individual words.
- Learn to understand the meanings of the words they hear and read.
- Learn to understand how writers organize words and sentences to communicate their ideas.
- Learn the background knowledge they need to understand everything they read by actively reading, listening to, and watching substantive and complex content about science, history, and art. Students should build word knowledge, world knowledge, and grammatical knowledge by listening to famous speeches, poems, and stories that communicate great ideas through complex, rhythmic, syntactical structures.
The Phonics Diet©
The ScholarSkills Sentence Smart Reading Comprehension Curriculum incorporates these six steps into the following ten exercises that should be done each week. This is a rigorous, intensive, systematic course.
Students RISE daily through Rigorous, Intensive, Systematic Exercises in decoding, spelling, reading, and writing, which require at least 30 minutes of commitment every day.
The Phonics Diet
(10 Weekly Exercises to help students take the Steps to Reading Success)
Students RISE daily through Rigorous, Intensive, Systematic Exercises in decoding, spelling, reading, and writing, which require at least 30 minutes of commitment every day.
The Phonics Diet
(10 Weekly Exercises to help students take the Steps to Reading Success)
- Watch the Sound & Say Video Lesson for that day and build the word or words that are in the video. This helps students to practice their decoding skills.
- Watch the Alpha-Phonics video. Repeat the words with the instructor. Learn precise word recognition and pronunciation by reviewing and rehearsing the words in the Alpha-Phonics Video at least twice that day.
- Practice building words from the Sound & Say Word-Builders Daily Lesson Plan. Students should write each word into their notebooks.
- Practice exciting word-recognition activities such as phonics-scrabble and word-scramblers with their letter sound cards. This helps students to reinforce word recognition.
- Practice precise pronunciation by reading the corresponding Alpha-Phonics lesson into the online recording system. Students can read one video lesson per night.
- Spelling and Dictation exercise: Students should also listen to the audio recordings of words from their Alpha-Phonics textbook, and write down each word. This helps them to decode from speech to print. These exercises can also be dictated by a parent-reading coach.
- Develop fluency by reading a decodable story into the online recording system.
- Build word and world knowledge (or background knowledge) by listening to a classical poem or a portion of a great story (at bedtime or dinner). (Please feel free to use the ScholarSkills Audio Classics for Kids.)
- Build word and world knowledge by reading a portion of an informational article about science, history, or current events.
- Take a virtual or actual trip to a culturally enriching place such as a museum on the weekends.