Regional Office of Education #13

Phonics involves matching the sounds of spoken English with individual letters or groups of letters and teaching to blend the sounds of letters together to decode unfamiliar or unknown words by sounding them out. With older students this has to be taught with texts that they can read and want to read. (Ivey & Broaddus, 2001). This training will give the basics of Phonics and when you put it with readable, interesting texts, improvement will come. Teaching anything in isolation will result in little growth, if any.

Fluency is the ability to read accurately with reasonable speed and expression while understanding the text. Modeling how a reading should sound, letting students read with a partner and give each other positive feedback, echo reading, rereading, and teacher listens in to support the reading is how fluency instruction should look like. This training will give many ideas for fluency instruction for immediate use.

Teaching Vocabulary must be planned if working with struggling readers. Students need multiple and various exposures to a word before they fully understand that word and can apply it. Learning words in context, not in isolation, but by reading. Every classroom needs a stocked library of high interest, age-appropriate books, articles, manuals, informational texts, etc. This training will give teachers ideas to try and use immediately. Leveling affixes, roots, and base words will contribute to better fluency in students. Academic vocabulary will build student comprehension when answering questions. This training will engage the participants in ideas to use immediately in their classroom.

This module is the culmination of all the foundations of reading. This is the module that supports students in understanding what they read, remember what they read, and communicate to others about what they read. Teachers know that a good reader is purposeful, active and metacognitive, answers their own questions, and generates questions on their own. Students need to know story structure, build background knowledge, text structure, text features, summarizing ability, visualization, and have the ability to talk about what they read. Explicit instruction will catch students up to grade level. All the foundations come together for comprehension. This is where critical thinking begins.

We strive to bring our educators excellent presenters and of course that comes with a cost. When our teachers and administrators register to attend a workshop or administrator academy, we expect them to honor their intention to participate. As we move forward, there will be a charge of $125 for participants who register for this offering, but do not attend. Please notify our office five days in advance if you cannot participate.