This article describes two processes that are essential to teaching beginning reading to students with learning disabilities: phonological awareness and word recognition, and provides tips for teaching these processes to students.
PALS is funded through Virginia Reads grants and the University of Virginia. The PALS website includes: 1) a section where teachers return their class scores to UVA and receive an immediate summary report, 2) a page where principals and district representatives can receive summaries of their schools’ PALS scores, and 3) more than a hundred instructional suggestions and activities, based on PALS screening sections.
Additional and explicit instruction in phonological awareness is a critical component in helping fourth grade readers who struggle with phonological deficits. The exercises can be used as a warm-up prior to reading, spelling, or vocabulary instruction.
From decades of research about how young children can best learn to read, we know that there are core skills and cognitive processes that need to be taught. In this basic overview, you’ll find concrete strategies to help children build a solid foundation for reading.
Early identification is crucial when it comes to helping children who are having trouble learning to read. This seminal article by Joseph Torgesen explains the assessment process and reviews the more commonly used assessment tools.
The term “onset-rime” refers to the division of a syllable into two parts: the onset and the rime. The onset is the initial consonant sound, blend, or digraph, and the rime is the following vowel and all subsequent sounds in the syllable. Understanding onset and rime is fundamental in phonological awareness.
Blending and segmenting games and activities can help students to develop phonemic awareness — the ability to hear the individual sounds in spoken words. Begin with segmenting and blending syllables, and then move to working with individual sounds (phonemes). Learning to blend and segment sounds is key to learning to read.
Learn how school psychologists can partner with reading specialists and classroom teachers to evaluate the benefits of early intervention reading programs in their districts.
This episode focuses on phonological awareness. Reading expert Linda Farrell helps kindergartener Autumn learn to blend two parts of a syllable (onset and rime). Watch how Ms. Farrell gives Autumn explicit practice with onset and rime — a core phonological awareness skill that helps kids recognize and blend sound chunks within syllables. This is an essential step toward developing phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness, a vital pre-reading skill, is being able to blend, segment, and manipulate the sounds in words.
