Chapter Notes/Reflection Journal (Bell)

What are the Critical Areas of Reading?
In addition to labels applied by the NRP to five identified critical areas of reading. These include:phonemic awareness,phonics,fluency,vocabulary and comprehension. The NRP uses additional terms that will be of interest to teachers.

Alphabetics include both phonemic awareness and phonics. Armbrister and Osborn authored,"Put Reading First, The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read," 2001. They emphasized the importance of alphabetic principle. In order to master phonemic awareness and phonics skills.students must learn to use the alphabetic principle-the understanding that there are systematic and predictable rerlationships between written letters and spoken words. (Armbruster and Osborn,2001,12).

What are the recommended strategies for teaching phonemic awareness?

1. Phonemic isolation- requires recognizing individual sounds.

2. Phonemic Identity- requires recognizing the common sound in different words. (Such as tell me the sound that is the same as bike, etc.

3. Phonemic categorization- requires recognizing the word with the odd sound in a sequence of three or four words. Example: Which word does not belong? Bus, bun, rug.

4. Phoneme blending- requires listening to a sequence of separately spoken sounds and combining them to form a recognizable word. Example: What word is /s/k/u/l/? (School)

5. Phoneme segmentation- requires breaking a word into sounds by tapping out or counting the sounds, or by pronouncing and positioning a marker for each sound. Example: How many phonemes in ship?

6. Phoneme deletion- requires recognizing what word remains when a specified phoneme is removed. Example: What is smile without the /s/? (mile)


In addition to the 6 subtypes, onset-rime manipulation is also included. It requires isolation, identification, segmentation, blending, or deletion of onsets, (the single consonant or blend that precedes the vowel in a syllable) or rimes (the vowel and following consonants). For example:-j-ump, st-op, str-ong, bl-ock.

Since my subject is 5 years old, I plan to use this information while I am testing him. I will test him over these 6 components.