Foundation skills for reading

Foundation skills for reading 

 Phonological Awareness, Phonics, Vocabulary, and Reading Fluency

The Big 5 of Reading Comprehension

1.Ability to identify the main idea and keydetails

How do I support struggling students?

You can work through category-sorting activities to help students build this foundational skill. For example, you may give students a number of different foods including fruits, vegetables, desserts, etc., and ask them to create categories and then label each individual category with the big picture (in this case food).

2.Ability to sequencea passage into ordinal ones

You can provide events or stories out of order and have students work independently or in groups to get the order back into a reasonable sequence. Start off small with first/last and then progress to longer sequences.

3.Ability to answer direct recall questions

You may want to consider highlighting or color-coding any who, what, when, and where topics with different colors. We LOVE using highlighters and visual representations to clue into key information. So many of our students really need this visual and even better if you can be consistent with your colors. For example, always color a who in yellow, what in orange, where in green, and when in blue.

4.Ability to make inferences or predictions

Give LOTS of opportunities to work through passages that require inferences and making predictions. You can also play games with younger students to help them begin to process this information. For example, “I am wearing a coat, gloves, and a hat - where am I?” You can easily adapt these same games for older students “the year is 1912, I’m on a boat, I’m about to take over a previously established land - who am I”.

5.Identify unfamiliar vocabulary

How do I support struggling students?

Give students a framework for recognizing unknown vocabulary and self-assessing using a structured approach to defining words.more