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Reading is the foundation upon which your child’s education is built. We all want to make sure that our children are learning the right things at the right time. However, jargon used by educators and literacy experts to describe reading curriculum is often specialized and difficult to understand. Here is a list of buzzwords that will help you better understand what your child is learning and allow you to participate in his reading education: Decoding: also known as phonological recoding. Decoding is the ability to read by generating all of the sounds into a recognizable word. Decoding allows a child to quickly understand a word’s meaning. Fluency: the clear and easily written or spoken expression of ideas. A child reads fluently when he reads words in a text accurately and can comprehend what he reads. Main ideas: central messages of passages that are expressed or implied in succinct phrases. At this level, a main idea often is expressed in the topic sentence of a paragraph. Determining the main idea of a story is essential for good reading comprehension skills. Phonemic awareness: the awareness of phonemes—the smallest units of sounds that make up spoken words. Letter or graphemes, represent phonemes; to learn the connection between letters and sounds, one must have some understanding of the notion that words are made up of phonemes. Children learning to read must possess this awareness. Phonics: a system of teaching beginning readers pronunciation and reading by learning the symbol-sound relationships through letters, words and syllables. Print awareness: starts with being familiar with the letters of the alphabet. Children must recognize letters to understand that all words are made of letter sequences and patterns. Once a child can easily discern the shapes of letters, he can move to learning letter-sound pairings. Print awareness also involves reading from left-to-right and understanding punctuation. Reading comprehension: the ability to understand the content of a story. It goes beyond recognizing words; it is grasping the message of what is being read. Build reading comprehension skills by using picture clues to clarify meaning, recalling and sequencing the events of a story, and identifying the main idea of a story. Vocabulary development: the process of increasing a reader’s scope of words he understands. Vocabulary increases with heightened exposure to words. Reading helps children develop a larger vocabulary. When a reader encounters a new word, it is best to look up and remember the word, its spelling and its meaning. By Renee Sarnowski |
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