Primary phonics storybooks free pdf download

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A notable aspect of Stein's first-grade analysis is the variability with which major instructional categories are emphasized by the different basal programs. As the table shows, although the programs unanimously support instruction on reading comprehension, few programs emphasize the development of reading fluency, and. Moreover, the cells with lowest percentages of support center on two categories of instruction: explicit teaching and application of the alphabetic principle and writing.

Ironically, these relatively neglected instructional components are among those whose importance is most strongly supported by research. These are the components that have repeatedly been shown to distinguish programs of exceptional instructional efficacy; they also correspond to the abilities that are found to be differentially underdeveloped in students with reading difficulty. Programs that ignore necessary instructional components tacitly delegate the pedagogical support on which their sales are predicated to the intervention of teachers, tutors, or parents.

Even when a program does address key instructional components, it may or may not do so with clarity or effect. In this vein, a particular problem is the currently popular publishing strategy of accommodating the range of student interests and teacher predilections by providing activities to please everyone in each lesson.

By making it impossible for teachers to pursue all suggestions, the basal programs make it necessary for teachers to ignore some of them. A good basal program should clearly distinguish key from optional activities. Basal programs are used in the majority of first-grade classrooms in the United States and thus have substantial influence on both classroom practice and teacher development.

In view of this, guidelines and procedures for aligning their instructional goals and methods with research are urgently needed, as are policies for requiring empirical evaluation of their instructional efficacy. In first grade, the challenge for children is to learn how to read. Written language becomes both the primary and the fallback medium through which they are expected to acquire and demonstrate their. Phonemic Awareness: games or activities that focus on words and their phonemic elements, oral segmenting and blending activities, oral syllabication, and rhyming activities.

It should be noted that, to discriminate phonemic awareness from decoding strategy instruction, only oral activities are included in this category. Observable relationship: activities designed specifically to help students decode the text selection. Observable phonics relationship: text clearly written to provide multiple examples of the phonics instruction in the program.

Activities explicitly labeled as opportunities for students to build reading fluency. The second and third grades are critical school years for ensuring that all students can make this transition, by building their capacity to comprehend more difficult and more varied texts.

At the same time, the curriculum must be designed with due recognition that students' higher-order comprehension can be limited not only by the presence or absence but also by the automaticity of lower-level skills.

Higher-order comprehension processes are necessarily thought in-. They require analytic, evaluative, and reflective access to local and long-term memory.

Yet active attention is limited. To the extent that readers must struggle with recognizing the words of a text, they lose track of meaning Daneman and Tardiff, ; Perfetti, By the end of third grade, students should possess the skills, habits, and learning strategies needed for fourth grade success. This means not only that students should be reading on grade level but also that they should be demonstrably prepared to discuss, learn about, and write about the ideas and information encountered in their texts.

By the end of second grade, students should have been introduced, with guidance, to representative types of text-based learning and performance to come and should be reading at least simple chapter books and other texts of their choice with comfort and understanding.

At the beginning of second grade, however, the reading of many children is too laborious and unsure to admit independent reading or understanding of any but the simplest of texts. At least in early acquisition, reading ability is a bit like foreign language ability: use it or lose it, and the more tenuous the knowledge, the greater the loss. Thus, the well-documented and substantial losses in reading ability that are associated with summer vacation are especially marked for younger and poorer readers Hayes and Grether, ; Alexander and Entwisle, On the first day of school, second-grade teachers thus typically find themselves faced with two sets of students.

A few are reading independently at relatively advanced levels; typically these are students who read well enough at the end of first grade to read on their own during the summer. Many other students seem not to know how to read at all. Most of the latter have simply forgotten what they learned in the first grade, but some failed to learn to read adequately in the first place.

As quickly as possible, the second-grade teacher's job is to figure out which group is which and to ensure that all students gain or regain the first-grade accomplishments and move on.

Second-grade basal reading programs generally provide little help toward this end, as they start where they left off at the end of grade one. Given well-structured review, children who have simply forgotten will generally recover quickly. In contrast, for children who fell or sneaked through the cracks in first grade, identification and assistance are urgent.

In school lore, second grade is broadly viewed as children's last chance. Those who are not on track by third grade have little chance of ever catching up Bloom, ; Carter, ; Shaywitz et al.

A major task for the second-grade teacher, then, is to ensure that all students understand the nature and utility of the alphabetic principle. To develop the children's phonemic awareness and knowledge of basic letter-sound correspondences, spelling instruction is important. Beginning with short, regular words, such as pot, pat, and pan, the focus of these instructional activities is gradually extended to more complex spelling patterns and words, including long vowel spellings, inflections, and so on.

In later grades, such instruction should extend to spellings and meanings of prefixes, suffixes, and word roots: leading children to notice such patterns across many different examples supports learning the target words and helps children transfer spelling patterns and word analysis strategies beyond the lesson, into their own reading and writing Calfee and Henry, ; Henry, Several guides for spelling instruction e.

When readers cannot recognize a word or a spelling pattern and have no one to ask, they have one of two options. They can use context or pictures to guess or finesse its identity, or they can sound it out.

Each of these options produces its own patterns of error and dysfluency. Laboratory research with good and poor readers at second grade and beyond has repeatedly demonstrated that, whereas good readers become as fast and accurate at recognizing words without context as with, poor readers as a group remain differentially dependent on context.

An overreliance on context is symptomatic. For readers who are progressing normally, it is often not before the middle of second grade that the ability to read with expressive fluency and comprehension emerges reliably Chall, ; Gates, ; Gray, ; Ilg and Ames, Clinical Harris and Sipay, evidence and laboratory Stanovich, evidence concur that children who can read second-grade texts accurately can read and learn from text with reasonable efficiency and productivity on their own, provided the text level is appropriate.

One of the most important questions for second- and third-grade teachers is therefore how best to help children reach this level. Given that the goal is to help children learn to read the words and understand them too, a promising tactic would seem to be to engage them in more connected reading of appropriate text.

It has long been appreciated that a critical factor in considering the learning impact of time spent reading is the difficulty of the text relative to the student's ability.

Common terms to describe differences among text are the following:. Regardless of a child's reading ability, if too many of the words of a text are problematic, both comprehension and reading growth itself are impeded. As a general rule, it has been suggested that error.

If the goal is to increase reading proficiency as quickly as possible, however, this creates a dilemma: whereas children are capable of learning little from text that is beyond their independent level, there is little new for them to learn from text that is beneath their instructional level. When the goal is to help students conquer any particular text, one widely validated practice is that of asking students to read it several times over Samuels et al. The effect of repeated reading practice generalizes to new texts only if the overlap of occurrence of specific words is high between the texts Faulkner and Levy, ; Rashotte and Torgeson, Researchers using this approach have recently reported some promising, if small sample, results with poor readers in third and fourth grades Shany and Biemiller, Instead of using repeated readings of any single passage, the children read from basal reading series that, in the style of the s, were designed to repeat new words across selections.

Each child in the experimental condition began at a level in the series that matched her or his own independent reading level. Each was then asked to read successive selections from these books for 30 minutes a day, four times a week, for 16 weeks.

Half the children were assisted by a teacher who helped with word recognition as needed; the other half read in tandem with an audiotape machine whose rate was adjustable from 80 to words per minute. Over the course of the intervention, the children in the teacher assisted group read five times more words of text than their ability matched classroom controls; those in the tape-assisted group covered 10 times more words of text than the controls.

Both experimental groups made significantly greater gains than controls in speed and comprehension of connected reading. In a more ambitious intervention, Stahl et al. The schools were in mixed- to lower-income districts.

On testing in October of second grade, the. In these classrooms, the teachers introduced each new basal selection by reading it aloud. The discussion following the reading of the selection was complemented with teacher- and student-generated questions and vocabulary work.

In addition, the selection was explored more analytically with the help of a variety of organizational frames such as story maps, plot charts, and Venn diagrams.

Children in need of extra help were pulled aside for echo reading: each paragraph was read first by the teacher and then by the students.

That evening, each student was to read the selection again at home, preferably aloud to a parent. The next day, students paired up, taking turns reading each page or paragraph to each other. The partner reading routine was pursued for three reasons. First, reading with another was useful in keeping children engaged and on task. Second, the teacher could easily monitor progress and performance by moving around the classroom and listening.

Third, following Chall's recommendation, the researchers sought to increase students' amount of oral reading.

For further reinforcement, a variety of other options were adopted from time to time, such as having each child practice reading one part of the selection for performance; students still having difficulty were asked to reread the selection at least one more time at home. Each selection was also reviewed by completing journals in pairs or as a class. In addition to this work with the basal selections, children were asked to read books of their own choice, both during each school day for minutes and at home.

In short, the program was set up to promote comprehension growth while encouraging a great deal of reading and rereading for building reading fluency. Responses to the program were strongly positive from both teachers and students. Oral reading growth was assessed by asking a subsample of 89 students to read aloud both familiar and previously unseen excerpts from their basal reader in November, January, and May.

Growth was most pronounced for children who had been reading at or above. Due to ceiling effects, improvement among the children who began the year above the second-grade level could not be measured. The group that started the year below the primer level never caught up; their readings of the basal passages continued to be slow and error prone.

Impact of the intervention was also measured by using Leslie and Caldwell's Qualitative Reading Inventory. This test consists of graded passages for oral reading, each accompanied by comprehension questions. Growth across the school year averaged 1. Of the students who started second grade at the primer level or above, only 5 were still unable to read at the second-grade level by spring. For 20 who could not read even the primer on entry, 9 reached or surpassed the second-grade level by spring, and all but one could read at least at the primer level.

Thus, although about 10 percent of the children were still performing below grade level, and although results are measured against expectable gains rather than against the performance of a control group, the outcomes of the study are impressive. It was also longer in duration and broader in scope than most other second-grade reading interventions. In particular, its scope embraced both fluency and comprehension support; children need both.

Mature readers construct meaning at two levels. One level works with the words of the text for a literal understanding of what the author has written. However, superior word recognition abilities do not necessarily translate into superior levels of reading achievement Chall et al. Productive reading involves, in addition to literal comprehension, being able to answer such questions as: Why am I reading this and how does this information relate to my reasons for so doing? What is the author's point of view, what are her or his underlying assumptions?

Do I understand what the author is saying and why? Do I know where the author is headed? Is the text. Is it consistent with what I already know or believe? If not, where does it depart and what do I think about the discrepancy? This sort of reflective, purposive understanding goes beyond the literal to the underlying meaning of the text. For purposes of discussion, the development of productive reading comprehension can be considered in terms of three factors: 1 concept and vocabulary development, 2 command of the linguistic structures of the text, and 3 metacognitive or reflective control of comprehension.

Written text places high demands on vocabulary knowledge. Even the words used in children's books are more rare than those used in adult conversations and prime-time television Hayes and Ahrens, Learning new concepts and the words that encode them is essential for comprehension development.

People's ability to infer or retain new words in general is strongly dependent on their background knowledge of other words and concepts. Even at the youngest ages, the ability to understand and remember the meanings of new words depends quite strongly on how well developed one's vocabulary already is Robbins and Ehri, Can children's word knowledge and reading comprehension be measurably improved through instruction? The answer is yes, according to a meta-analysis of relevant research studies by Stahl and Fairbanks First, vocabulary instruction generally does result in measurable increase in students' specific word knowledge.

Sometimes and to some degree it also results in better performance on global vocabulary measures, such as standardized tests, indicating that the instruction has evidently enhanced the learning of words beyond those directly taught. Second, pooling across studies, vocabulary instruction also appears to produce increases in children's reading comprehension. Again, although these gains are largest where passages contain explicitly taught words, they are also significant given general standardized measures.

Looking across studies, Stahl and Fairbanks noted differences in the effectiveness of vocabulary instruction as well.

Methods providing repeated drill and practice on word definitions resulted in significant improvement with the particular words that had been taught but no reliable effect on reading comprehension scores. An important source of word knowledge is exposure to print and independent reading. As noted above, books introduce children to more rare words than conversation or television does. So educational approaches that encourage children to read more both in school and out should increase their word knowledge Nagy and Anderson, and reading comprehension Anderson et al.

However, several efforts to increase the breadth of children's reading have produced little measurable effect on their reading ability Carver and Liebert, ; see review in Taylor et al. Alternately, perhaps children who are doing poorly are less likely to profit from extensive exposure to print than children who are already progressing quite well. One group of researchers reviewed interactions among print exposure, word knowledge, and comprehension, teasing apart the relations among prior ability and increased reading Stanovich et al.

They concluded p. Even children with limited comprehension skills will build vocabulary and cognitive structures through immersion in literacy activities.

An encouraging message for teachers of lowachieving children is implicit here. The relation between print exposure and comprehension need not be limited to the child's own reading in school. Cain studied the home literacy activities of 7- and 8-year-olds whose word reading accuracy was appropriate for their chronological age but who differed in their comprehension ability.

She reports the following contrasts: "The children who were skilled comprehenders reported reading books at home more frequently than the less skilled children, and their parents reported that they were more likely to read story books. The skilled comprehenders also reported that they. The skilled children were significantly more likely to read books with their parents than were the less skilled children and also tended to talk about books and stories more frequently than did the less skilled comprehenders.

It might be assumed that reading aloud with a child loses its value once children have attained independent accuracy in reading words, but Cain's findings raise the possibility that being read to promotes skilled comprehension at ages 7 and 8, although she points out that no causal link has yet been demonstrated.

The breadth and depth of a child's literacy experiences determine not only how many and what kinds of words she or he will encounter but also the background knowledge with which a child can conceptualize the meaning of any new word and the orthographic knowledge that frees that meaning from the printed page.

Every opportunity should be taken to extend and enrich children's background knowledge and understanding in every way possible, for the ultimate significance and memorability of any word or text depends on whether children possess the background knowledge and conceptual sophistication to understand its meaning.

The emphasis of the program is on the comprehension of interesting texts. The program is designed around broad interdisciplinary themes, exploiting real-world experiences, a range of cognitive strategies, and social groupings to promote self-direction. Designed for third graders in high-poverty schools with a history of low achievement, it has been successfully used at both the classroom and the whole-school level.

The third-grade students have ranged in reading levels from first to fourth grade, and students with limited English proficiency are mainstreamed and included in the classroom. The program has effectively increased narrative text comprehension, expository text comprehension, and other language.

Compared to control students, students in the program improved significantly on reading, writing, science, social studies, and language use but not in math, which was not taught in the program. CORI has also been shown to increase the amount and breadth of independent reading and volitional strategies for maintaining engagement in reading activities.

Research on comprehension among young readers has not resolved questions about the nature and separate identity of the difficulties they encounter as they attempt to understand texts. It is difficult to tease apart the effect of stores of word knowledge and background knowledge from the effect of processes e. Instruction for comprehension, however, generally focuses on understanding complete connected text in situations in which many of the possible difficulties appear bound together and often can be treated as a bundle to good effect.

Many comprehension instruction techniques used in schools today are described as meta-cognitive. A meta-analysis of 20 meta-cognition instruction programs found a substantial mean effect size of. Instructional programs focusing on self-questioning and identifying text consistencies were found to be most effective. A meta-analysis of 10 studies related to a technique called reciprocal teaching found a median effect size of.

For most active comprehension instruction, whether considered meta-cognitive or not, two pedagogic processes are intermingled: traditional instruction in basic stores of knowledge the background for the text and for particular words and instruction in particular comprehension strategies complemented by the active skilled reading. The children have an opportunity to learn from the joint participation a form of cognitive apprenticeship as well as from the particulars in the instructional agenda.

As Baker notes, it is an open question whether direct instruction or observational learning provides the greater contribution to student progress. Reciprocal teaching is a particularly interesting approach to consider in detail both because of its apparent effectiveness and because it illustrates the mixed instructional agenda and pedagogical strategies. Reciprocal teaching provides guided practice in the use of four strategies predicting, question generating, summarizing, and clarifying that are designed to enhance children's ability to construct the meaning of text Palincsar et al.

To engage in reciprocal teaching dialogues, the children and their teacher read a piece of common text. This reading may be done as a read-along, a silent reading, or an oral reading, depending on the decoding abilities of the children and the level of the text. The children and the teacher take turns leading the discussion of segments of the text, using strategies to support their discussion. The ultimate purpose of the discussion, however, is not practice with the strategies but the application of the strategies for the purpose of coming to a shared sense of the meaning of the text at hand.

The tenets of reciprocal teaching include a meaningful use of comprehension-monitoring and comprehension-fostering strategies; b discussion for the purpose of building the meaning of text; c the expectation that, when children are first beginning these dialogues, they will need considerable support provided by the teacher's modeling of the use of the strategies and guiding students' participation in the dialogues; d the use of text that offers appropriate challenges to the children i.

Reciprocal teaching was designed as both an intervention to be used with youngsters who were experiencing language-related diffi-. It has been investigated principally with children who come from high-poverty areas, children being served in developmental and remedial reading programs, and children identified as having a language or learning disability.

Research on reciprocal teaching with young children in first and second grades indicates statistically significant improvement in listening comprehension which assessed ability to recall information, summarize information, draw inferences from text, and use information to solve a novel problem and fewer referrals to special education or remedial reading programs. In addition, teachers reported that, as a result of their experiences in reciprocal teaching dialogues, their expectations regarding these children were raised.

In other words, children who appeared to have a disability on the basis of their participation in the conventional classroom dynamic appeared quite able in the context of reciprocal teaching dialogues.

Training studies on inferences and comprehension monitoring with 7- and 8-year-olds show that children identified specifically as poor comprehenders profit differentially from certain kinds of instruction. Yuill and Oakhill compared the effect on skilled and less skilled comprehenders matched for age and reading accuracy of a program that lasted for seven minute sessions spread over about two months.

The treatment group worked on lexical inferences, question generation, and prediction. One control group read the same texts and answered questions about them in a group discussion format. A second control group read the same texts and practiced rapid word decoding.