Reading Assessments Begins Wednesday, September 10th and ends Wednesday, September 17th

PLEASE MAKE SURE YOUR CHILD GETS PLENTY OF SLEEP THIS WEEK........

It's Assessment Week for Emergent Readers!

1. Arches Academy finds students' instructional levels by assessing their reading skills with developmentally appropriate texts while recording reading behavior. Benchmark Passages are short text selections that are one part of a three-part process to help place students at their instructional levels for leveled reading sessions and to assess their readiness to progress to the next level.  This assessment is computer based and done through A-Z Reading.

Along with the Raz-Kids assessments I will be meeting with each student and will do the following paper based assessments:

 Word Family Recognition

Sight Word Recognition

Reading Nonsense Words - Phonics

 Reading Nonsense Words - CVC and VC - Phonics

Reading Nonsense Words - Short Vowels and Long Vowels

Manipulating Sounds - Phonological Awareness

Identifying Rime 1 & 2- Phonological Awareness

 Blending Onset and Rime - Phonological Awareness

Segmenting Onset and Rime - Phonological Awareness

Manipulating Onset and Rime - Phonological Awareness

Identifying Rhyming Words - Phonological Awareness

What is the difference between PHONICS (or Phonemic Awareness and PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS?

Phonological Awareness- Phonological awareness is a general appreciation of how spoken language can be divided into its components.  For example, we speak in sentences.  Sentences can be broken down into words and words into syllables.  Breaking words into onset-rime and an appreciation of rhyme and alliteration fall under the category of phonological awareness.

Phonemic Awareness- The word “phoneme” means sound.  When a word is broken down into its smallest unit, a sound (or phoneme), the term “phonemic awareness” is used.  Phonemic awareness is a sub skill of the broad category of phonological awareness.  Phoneme isolation, blending, and segmenting are several skills that fall under this category.

Phonics and phonemic awareness are not the same.  Phonics involves how speech sounds correspond to the written letter or letter combinations.  Phonemic awareness is only about hearing and manipulating the individual speech sounds in words.  The best way to remember the difference between these two terms is to know that any phonemic awareness skills can be “done in the dark”.