ARI stands for Alabama Reading Initiative. To learn more about it, go to the Alabama State Dept. of Education website in my "Links" section.Back to Top
Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills It is a progress monitoring measure, given 3 times during each grade level. Dibels are a series of short tests given to children in Kindergarten through grade 3 (in Etowah County) to monitor and screen their progress in learning the necessary skills to become successful readers. All Dibels measures are timed, with most taking only one minute. The reason for the timing is to find out if a child is able to respond automatically and not take a long time to think about how to answer the questions or read the words correctly. Having these basic reading skills at the "automatic" level allows children to focus on understanding the meaning of what they are reading. This is the primary goal for our children...comprehension. THESE ARE THE DIFFERENT TESTS Letter Naming Kindergarten and first grade students are given a page with both capital and lower case letters and asked to name each one. The test tells us if the child is likely to struggle or be a successful reader in the future. It lets the teacher know which students need explicit instruction in letter naming. It only takes one minute to give this test. Initial Sounds By mid-kindergarten children should be able to recognize the beginning sounds in words automatically. In the DIBELS assessment, students are given a page with 4 pictures. They are asked to find the picture that starts with a particular sound or to say the beginning or initial sound in a word. They are asked 16 questions in this format. Phoneme Segmentation This is a measure of children�s awareness of the many sounds that make up words we speak. It is given to kindergarten and first grade students and is a skill that should be mastered by the end of kindergarten. An example of this is: a child is told the word �cat� and asked to say all of the sounds in the word. There are 3 sounds in �cat�. It is a 1 minute test. Nonsense Words This is a test of the ability to blend together the sounds represented by letters to make words. This skill helps children use their knowledge of the relationship between letters and sounds to read unfamiliar words. It is given to kindergarten, first, and second graders. The children are shown a page of make-believe words, like �tob� or �miv� and asked to read them by saying the individual sound of each letter in the word or the whole word itself. It takes only 1 minute to give this test. Oral Reading This is a measure of how fluently and accurately children can read passages written at their grade level. This is given throughout first, second, third grade. The children are given three passages and asked to read each one aloud for one minute. The words read correctly per minute are calculated. Children who read accurately and fluently are better able to understand what they read. This information is from the Florida Center for Reading Research http://www.fcrr.orgBack to Top
What does FLUENCY really mean?
Fluency is the ability to read text accurately and quickly. Fluency is one of the five key areas in learning to read. The other four are phonemic awareness, phonics, comprehension, and vocabulary. Fluency bridges word decoding and comprehension. Comprehension is understanding what has been read. Fluency is a set of skills that allows readers to rapidly decode text while maintaining high comprehension. Sight reading some words is a skill of fluency. The idea is that children will recognize at sight the most common words written in English and that instant reading of these words will allow them to read and understand text more quickly. Many common English words are so irregular according to the rules of phonics, so it is best to just memorize them from the start. Some examples of �sight words� are: one, was, if, even, or, they, the. Some experts in the field of beginning reading believe an over-emphasis on sight reading can be counterproductive by having children focus on word memorization while avoiding learning the important techniques of sounding out words. A combination of mastering the rules of phonics along with memorizing commonly occurring �sight words�, would be the initial strategies for teaching a beginning reader. Parents assist with fluency when they read aloud to children. Once the child is reading at first to second grade level, exercises with timed reading will help improve their reading speed. It demands parents and teachers are actively involved. Audio books for children, software and on-line reading programs can also provide opportunities for children to follow along in the text as the program reads aloud. This information is from www.Time4learning.comBack to Top