Struggling Readers
King Elementary is proud of our students and the literacy skills that they develop within our building. The graphic above represents the variety of skills that children must develop in order to learn how to read. The skills can be separated into two categories: listening skills and reading/identifying skills.
Students can begin developing these skills by focusing first on First Sound Fluency (purple) which measures a student’s ability to hear the first or beginning sound of a word. This skill focuses on having students identify only one sound that they hear in a word instead of multiple sounds. The second skill that students can work on is Letter Naming Fluency (blue). Students should be able to quickly identify upper and lower-case letters in a randomized order using different fonts. The third skill is called Phoneme Segmentation (green). This is a listening skill where students identify three sounds in sequential order from a word that is spoken to them. The final two skills are related, and they focus on having a child read nonsense words (make-believe words). Nonsense words are used to test a child’s ability to use letter and sound knowledge to decode unfamiliar words. Forcing students to read unfamiliar nonsense words helps adults to know what kind of decoding skills they possess. For more information about these activities that students can complete at home, please click on the following documents below.