Reading Readiness Curriculum:
Our curriculum (K-5) focuses on teaching children to read in context while giving readers a strong foundation of phonics and phonological awareness in grades K and 1.
In kindergarten, we use a “letter of the week” program that integrates context reading. Here is a brief explanation of the components of our reading readiness program in kindergarten.
§ Comprehension: We will be doing many activities to help your child develop a better understanding of the things that he reads or hears read. This will include things like: discussions about the characters in stories and their actions, making charts about the plot of the story, making props to help us retell the stories, putting the parts of the story in sequence, and many other activities.
§ Sight Words: This is a list of words that children need to know by sight (not sounding out) in order to be successful readers. I will introduce a few words each week and review words that were previously introduced. Don’t be surprised if your child does not know the first few sets of words in the first few weeks of school. We will be going over these words over and over again throughout the year and hopefully by the end of kindergarten; your child will have a good grasp of them.
§ Phonemic Awareness: Phonemic awareness deals with the ability to hear and recognize the differences between sounds. It progresses to the ability of a child to associate the sounds with letters as well as the ability to recognize the segmentation of sentences into words, words into “sound chunks,” and sound chunks into letter sounds.
§ Phonics: Phonics deals with the recognition of letters and the association of letters and sounds. It also deals with building an understanding of the patterns of sounds. (Ex: Th is always the “th” sound, the silent e rule, etc.)