Systems
Reading Levels
Steps in Classroom Assessment
Important Beginning Assessments
Phonemic Awareness
100

The sound system of English with approximately 44 sounds and more than 500 ways to spell the 44 sounds.

What is the phonological system?
100
Helps to determine appropriate text level for students. Taken as students read text. Script printed out, listen to student read, mark what they missed/get credit if they self-correct.
What are running records?
100

Teachers plan for assessment at the same time they’re planning for instruction


What is planning for assessment?
100

A subset of phonological awareness in which listeners are able to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes, the smallest units of sound that can differentiate meaning. 

What is phonemic awareness?
100

When children work with phonemes in words, they are manipulating the phonemes. Types of phoneme manipulation include blending phonemes to make words, segmenting words into phonemes, deleting phonemes from words, adding phonemes to words, or substituting one phoneme for another to make a new word.


What is phoneme manipulation?
200

The structural system of English that focuses on vocabulary.

What is the syntactic system?
200
95%-100% with good comprehension. Recognize almost all words, read fluently, and comprehend the message.
What is the independent reading level?
200
Teachers monitor students' learning every day and use the results to make instructional decisions.
What is monitoring students' progress?
200
Book orientation, directionality, letter and word concepts.
What are concepts about print?
200

The ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds -- phonemes -- in spoken words.

What is phonemic awareness?
300

The meaning system of English that focuses on vocabulary.

What is the semantic system?
300
90%-94% with adequate comprehension. Read with support but not on their own, recognize most words, and comprehend what they are reading with support from the teacher.
What is the instructional reading level?
300
Teachers monitor learning by using: Observations, Anecdotal Notes -- Data Notebooks, Conferences, and Checklists.
How do teachers monitor students' progress?
300
Strategies for segmenting, blending, substituting, rhyming. Consonant and vowel sounds.
What are phonemic awareness and phonics?
300
It improves children's word reading and reading comprehension. It helps children learn how to spell.
Why is phonemic awareness important?
400

The system of English that varies language according to social and cultural uses.

What is the pragmatic system?
400
Below 90% with poor comprehension. Don't recognize enough words automatically, read in a choppy, word by word manner, and have little understanding of what they read.
What is the frustration reading level?
400
Teachers evaluate students' actual reading and writing to make judgements about their achievement. Teachers collect work samples and apply rubrics.
What is evaluating students' learning?
400
Appropriate speed, expression and pausing (prosody), strategies for unfamiliar words.
What is fluency?
400
Phonemic awareness is a subset of the larger Phonological awareness.
How does phonemic awareness correlate with phonological awareness?
500
Readers use the four systems to make sense of what they're reading. The systems work together to help the reader comprehend text. 
How do students use the four systems during reading?
500
Classification system that arranges books along a continuum from easiest to hardest. Based on variables that influence reading difficulty such as genre and format of books, familiarity and interest level of content, word length and ease of decoding, and sentence length and complexity.
What are leveled books?
500
Teachers ask themselves questions about lessons, and analyze students' achievements.
What is reflecting on students' learning?
500

The patterns of stress and intonation in a language.

What is prosody?
500

Asking children to: Identify phonemes, Categorize phonemes, Blend phonemes to form words, Segment words into phonemes, Delete or add phonemes to form new words, Substitute phonemes to make new words, More effective when children are taught to manipulate phonemes by using the letters of the alphabet, When instruction focuses on only one or two rather than several types of phoneme manipulation 


How do you develop phonemic awareness?
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