Strategies, Practices and Tools
Decades of research provides a clear understanding of how skilled reading develops and how to most effectively support children in learning to read proficiently. Evidence-based, structured literacy instruction develops all the foundational language and literacy skills that must be woven together so that children can make meaning from the words they read.
The information presented here is intended to complement evidence-based core reading curricula and intervention programs already in place and help educators fill in gaps or modify their approaches with effective strategies, instructional practices, and tools and activities to implement them.
Early childhood educators can focus their practices to help children build language and emergent literacy skills. Pre-K and K-3 educators can find evidence-based ways to provide explicit, implicit, and incidental instruction across the essential components of literacy. And English Language Arts teachers across grades 4-12 will find effective practices to help students meet the increasing need for skilled reading.
Instructional Strategy
Provide explicit instruction and opportunities to practice all facets of alphabet knowledge including upper and lower case, upper and lower case letter naming, upper and lower case letter recognition, upper and lower case letter writing, as well as letter sound knowledge.
Students must demonstrate all components of alphabet knowledge. Letter knowledge skills are foundational for grasping the alphabetic principle. Also, letter knowledge is a predictor skill for successful reading and writing in first and second grades.
Effective Practices
- Teach letters in small groups using students’ existing alphabet knowledge.
- Teach letter name identification.
- Teach letter sound identification.
- Teach students to recognize letters in text.
- Teach a letter of the day, not a letter a week.
- Letter of the day yields six instructional cycles across the academic year.
- Engage in distributed and repeated instruction and intentional practice opportunities.
- Include forming the letter in the instructional routine.
- Include a picture of an object with the target sound being taught (image of a duck for “d”) (D says “/d/, /d/, /d/ duck).
- Kindergarten
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- Provide multiple opportunities for students to practice and demonstrate their ability to name 18 upper-case and 15 lower-case letters at the beginning of the year.
- Provide multiple opportunities for students to practice and demonstrate their ability to name, recognize, and write the letters, as well as identify/recognize sound by the middle of the year.
- Grade 1
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- Provide opportunities for students to demonstrate automaticity in alphabet knowledge:
- Letter naming
- Letter recognition
- Identify/recognize the sound
- Letter writing
- Provide opportunities for students to demonstrate automaticity in alphabet knowledge:
- Grade 2
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Use intervention strategies for students struggling with alphabet knowledge.
- Grade 3
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Use intervention strategies for students struggling with alphabet knowledge.
Tools and Activities
Letter of the Day Lesson Template
Jones, Clark, and Reutzel proposed an explicit instructional plan using a “letter of the day” sequence allowing for a letter to be taught explicitly at least six times across the academic year.
Download from Early Childhood Education Journal
Related
Developmental benchmarks and literacy behaviors that most children display at a particular age/grade.
Evidence-based reading interventions support students who are identified as struggling with specific foundational literacy skills.
Evidence-based core curricula, interventions, and supplemental programs play a critical role in supporting students’ reading success.
While seemingly effortless, good reading is made up of a set of complex skills and strategies.