Navigating the Core Curriculum - Toby J. Karten

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Screening and progress monitoring at set times during the year then steer the tiered instruction. Phonics inventories include teachers synthesizing and analyzing how students pronounce academic vocabulary, which then shed light on students’ basic phonemic skills.

      These inventories assess skill levels with phonemic awareness, fluency, and the comprehension of fiction, narrative, and expository text. Informal reading inventories analyze skills such as oral reading, comprehension, and word identification. This may include activities such as reading graded word lists, real and pseudo words, and passages. Teachers assess students on their responses to oral questions and vocabulary comprehension within passages and sentences and from word lists. Every content area and concept has its own vocabulary that teachers must identify and analyze for students with diverse reading skills and levels.

      Every content area and concept has its own vocabulary that teachers must identify and analyze for students with diverse reading skills and levels.

      It is vital that families provide a literacy-rich environment at home to reinforce skills and objectives with their children. Families can encourage their children to identify, pronounce, decode, and encode letters and sounds in isolation and within words in road signs, recipes, grocery stores, and newspapers. For example, while cooking spaghetti, parents can have their child identify final sounds of words, practice phoneme segmentation, and read the box directions.

      Daily and functional reads of fiction and nonfiction genres partner schools and homes, with students gaining many transferrable literacy skills. Functional reads include students’ everyday interactions with words displayed in books, video games, websites, newspapers, and more. The idea is for the reading to have function and meaning for each student, with school reads being fun ones too, not just viewed as assignments. Families can encourage good reading practices by modeling reading for their children, whether it is a newspaper, paperback book, or electronic device. Families can also read together, with schools offering book lists and strategies to promote increased literacy.

      The reproducible “Phonemic Awareness and Fluency Record” (page 35) is a tool to help students begin, advance, and fine-tune phonemic awareness skills, while the reproducible “Comprehension of Fiction, Narrative, and Expository Text” (page 36) helps teachers evaluate students’ skills in comprehending fiction, narrative, and expository text. These tools increase teacher knowledge of student levels as they plan their lessons.

      Teachers can collect this information to help develop student phonemic awareness, fluency, and reading comprehension profiles to identify learners’ baseline levels. They then use this knowledge to select interventions that address the specific areas that challenge students as they read more difficult vocabulary. Teachers can always advance and fine-tune students’ literacy skills, but identification is the initial step that begins the process.

      Teachers can always advance and fine-tune students’ literacy skills, but identification is the initial step that begins the process.

      The following curriculum examples help teachers identify students’ vocabulary needs and then engage students in productive application of the words across disciplines, without allowing complex vocabulary to interfere with conceptual understanding. A student may not understand a word because he or she does not know how to pronounce it. The teacher might then offer strategies to help that student decode a multisyllabic word, identify syllable types, pronounce consonant digraphs, or determine structural analysis. Students might know how to decode a word but cannot categorize or apply meaning in context. Teachers can portray words in deeper ways that allow for increased internalization. Establishing the proficiency levels determines the remediation required. Three steps—(1) identify knowledge, (2) intervene, and (3) ensure internalization—ultimately lead to strategies that allow students to prioritize, relate, and own the vocabulary.

      With RTI, the teacher identifies students’ vocabulary knowledge, intervenes with strategies, and ensures that students internalize the core vocabulary. He or she can accomplish this through whole-class instruction in Tier 1, smaller targeted groups in Tier 2, and more intensive instruction in Tier 3.

      Identify Knowledge

      Teachers can use the chart in figure 2.2 to note word-identification levels with a step-by-step approach, showing proficiency as well as need for remediation. Teachers listen to students read individually, in small groups, and during whole-class instruction. However, teachers should never ask a student to read aloud if he or she will be embarrassed. Due to time parameters, another option is to allow students to read into digital devices that staff, such as general and special education teachers, reading interventionists, speech-language pathologists, paraprofessionals, and the students themselves can review to note proficiencies. Hearing specific examples helps students develop metacognition.

      Hearing specific examples helps students develop metacognition.

      Teachers jot down words or sentences that raise concerns. For example, if a student reads the word wildlife as filewild that would indicate that he or she is transposing words; or if a student reads grandma’s seventieth birthday as grandma’s seventeenth birthday, this word error most certainly affects comprehension. The chart does not include every word-identification skill, but it encourages teachers to think about what errors mean in terms of their next instructional steps.

       Figure 2.2: Word identification, concepts, and vocabulary skills exercise.

      Intervene

      Teachers intervene and monitor with strategies that provide systematic and explicit vocabulary instruction. They share fiction and nonfiction books with oral reads, along with guided and independent practice across genres, disciplines, and multimedia formats, including vocabulary pictures and examples of word relationships. Students highlight words in text to increase recognition and appropriately demonstrate their ownership of the vocabulary across disciplines. Teachers activate the text-to-speech feature for online sites to increase fluency with models and offer feedback, guidance, and instruction.

      Ensure Internalization

      Finally, teachers must ensure students achieve and own vocabulary competency with transfer and application to other reading materials. Students establish personalized vocabulary connections through writing, conversation, and diverse engagements. When students internalize the vocabulary, they own it. This occurs through interactive vocabulary practice with words that include, but are not limited to, reflecting on prior knowledge from KWL (what I know, what I want to know, what I learned) charts, word mapping, and other graphic organizers, and practicing word usage with peers, songs, games, and skits.

      The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) offers concrete, visual ways for students to internalize vocabulary with word mapping and more on their ReadWriteThink website (www.readwritethink.org). Playing games such as Balderdash to determine correct word meanings, solving crossword puzzles, or pantomiming words are also viable ways to ensure vocabulary internalization beyond a skill-and-drill approach.

      The following elementary, middle, and high school lessons apply the identify knowledge, intervene, and ensure internalization approach across multiple content areas. (Visit go.SolutionTree.com/RTI to access more free reproducible lesson examples.)

      Grade 3 Lesson on Viking Culture

      A third-grade social studies class is studying Viking culture. The topic may not be in students’ prior knowledge, so when a learner completes a KWL chart, it helps teachers find out what students know or think they know.

       Identify Knowledge

      The

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