As teachers, parents, and volunteers we all need to accept the challenge of helping our children become successful readers and writers. Literacy is a part of every aspect of our world. It effects all other subject areas. My hope is to challenge every student to the best of their ability, while making learning fun and exciting. I want children to LOVE reading and writing and apply it to other areas of learning. By creating a caring, open environment most children will feel accepted and open their minds to learning. A few terms that you will hear through-out the year include: Phonemic Awareness and Phonics, Fluency, Word Recognition and Vocabulary, and Comprehension.

Phonemic Awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate sounds in the spoken word. Children that have strong phonemic awareness skills are more likey to succeed at reading and spelling. In the classroom, we will identify sounds, blend sounds to form words, take words apart to identify sounds, and manipulate them in many ways. Each child will be assessed on their ability to utilize these skills.

Phonics helps children learn the relationships between written letters and their sounds. It helps children use letter sounds and patterns to read and write words. As a part of our reading instruction, we will study all major letter-sound relationships in a very systematic manner.

Here are a few strategies to use when your child comes to an unknown word:

* Look at the pictures!!!!

* What word will make sense here? If your child says home instead of house, that's fine. It makes sense and it has the same beginning sound. Go back and look at the word when you are finished reading.

* Look at the beginning sound. What are some word possibilities?

*See if the word has any small chunks or parts that you recognize.

*Make a short attempt at sounding out the word.

*Skip the word and reread the sentence. Sometimes just the flow of a sentence will help a child decode an unknown word.

Vocabulary refers to the words we must know to communicate. It plays an important role in learning to read and reading comprehension. Children use the words they have heard and understand to assist them in reading for meaning. A child can increase their vocabulary through conversations, especially with adults, and through listening to adults read to him/her. Talk to your children when you are reading to them. Make sure they understand certain parts of the story or certain words. For example, I was reading Tom Sawyer to my girls and we came to the phrase "speechless with horror as they fled the scene". I paused and told them this was an interesting way of saying Tom and Huck were scared and ran away. Never underestimate the power of reading to your child. In summary, readers must know what most of the words mean, before they can understand what they are reading.

Fluency is the ability to read accurately and quickly. Fluent readers read with expression and their reading sounds natural as if they were talking. Children who are fluent can focus less on "figuring out" words and more on understanding what they are reading. Two proven ways to increase your child's rate of reading are reading to them and repeated oral readings. By reading aloud to your child, you can be a model of how to read using expression and a good rate of speed. Read a sentence or a paragraph to your child and then have them read it back to you. Repeated readings are also very important. Reading a story three or four times is a great way to increase fluency and increase word knowledge. Parents will see this strategy within my homework assignments. I send "bagbooks" home on Mondays and return them on Fridays. This way the child can read his/her books several times throughout the week. When stories get longer, the children can reread chapters or certain pages in the book.

Comprehension is the reason we read. If readers can read the words but do not understand what they are reading, they are not really reading.As adult readers,we do not read every word on every page, we read for meaning. That is our ultimate goal. I will monitor the children's comprehension using several strategies. We will use thinking maps, asking questions and answering questions, studying story structure as characters, setting, events,and retelling stories. Hopefully by the end of the year,the students will begin to monitor their own comprehension. For example, the child may say I didn't understand that word or that page and decide to reread it or ask for assistance. He/She is thinking about what they are reading, not just reading the words.

I hope to foster a love of readng in every child. I will use many different strategies, literacy stations and fun, but meaningful activites in my classroom to accomplish this goal. I want every child to experience growth and success at their own level of reading. Be very proud of your child's accomplishments!

Resources Utilized

Put Reading First funded by the National Institute for Literacy (www.nifl.gov)

Literacy Work Stations by Debbie Diller