Title I Reading Program Overview

Ocean City Primary School Title I Reading Program

To empower students to become more proficient, thoughtful, and motivated readers.

Title I reading instruction is provided to students whom are not meeting grade level standards in the area of reading. Placement in the K-3 Title I reading program is determined by student’s independent reading level, MAP assessment, and teacher recommendation. During Title I reading instruction, students receive individualized and small group reading instruction on a daily basis. We focus on supporting students becoming strong independent readers while targeting instruction at their current levels and differentiating instruction to meet each student’s unique needs. Guided reading, shared reading, interactive read alouds, close reading, one on-one conferences, strategy lessons, and word study (phonemic awareness, phonics, high frequency word acquisition) are the main methods of teaching utilized in this program to meet students’ reading needs. Explicit instruction of reading skills and strategies is provided to students. These strategies are chosen based on student’s instructional levels in order to move them along a trajectory of learning. Students are provided with books, reading logs, and instructional tools to allow for independent practice. We are committed to giving our children lots of time to be in the act of reading at school and at home. There is an abundance of research evidence which suggests that volume of reading is linked to attaining higher-order literacy proficiencies (Allington, 2012; Brozo et al, 2008, Cipielewski & Stanovich, 1992). Anderson, Wilson, and Fielding (1988) researched the relationship between the amount of reading done and reading achievement. They found that the amount of time reading was the best predictor of reading achievement, including a child’s growth as a reader. Our Title I reading program also provides instructional reading support to parents and teachers as needed.

We teach concepts of print to emergent readers in order to provide a foundation for literacy development. Research: Marie Clay calls concepts about print “the rules of the road,” and writes, “Teachers must teach so that all children become knowledgeable about these essential concepts so they open doors to literacy.” She explains that teachers who have an understanding of what aspects of print their students are attending to can introduce students early on to print conventions through experiences in both reading and writing—especially through focused instruction in the first six months of school.

We teach phonemic awareness and phonics accompanied by word-solving strategies to support students’ ability to decode unfamiliar print.

Research: Clay (1991, 1993) and Goodman (1970) made us aware that children are provided with multiple sources of information when they read text. Effective reading instruction balances the teaching of letter-sound correspondences and patterns with the teaching of how good readers engage in the reading process. As children encounter new books each day, they need to practice using all available sources of information in an integrated, reciprocal manner: the meaning (semantic), language structure (syntactic), and visual (graphophonic) cue systems. If a child neglects to use or over uses one source of information, the teacher needs to address the integration of the neglected cue system(s) during guided reading instruction.

We teach high frequency word acquisition to support student’s automaticity of print.

Research: LaBerge and Samuels (2006) call this automatic recognition of high frequency words part of automaticity. They state that when these words are instantly recognized, the short term memory is not overloaded and is freed to focus on comprehension of what is going on in the story.

We provide our students with books that are appropriately matched to their independent and instructional reading levels in order to deliver successful instructional opportunities.

Research: Marie Clay’s meticulous study of the complexity of the reading process, through detailed coding of thousands of readings, showed that when a text is too difficult for the child the process breaks down and the child does not develop inner control of effective actions for processing texts. When the text poses enough challenge, but not too much, the child has opportunities with effective, explicit teaching to build his network of effective problem solving actions.

We model comprehension skills and strategies and provide opportunities for students to think, talk, and write about text in order to increase comprehension.

Research: Duke and Pearson (2002) also recommend teaching comprehension skills and strategies to support achievement, but with an important caveat, in “Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension,” stating, “it is important that neither the teacher nor the students lose sight of the need to coordinate or orchestrate comprehension strategies. Strategies are not to be used singly—good readers do not read a book and only make predictions. Rather, good readers use multiple strategies constantly” (p. 210). Allington’s (2002) research yielded similar findings, noting that “exemplary teachers in our study routinely gave direct, explicit demonstrations of the cognitive strategies that good readers use when they read.”

We teach strategies and encourage rereading of text to improve their rate, prosody, and expression in order to become more fluent oral readers.

Research: Developing fluency in reading requires practice; this is where the method of repeated readings comes in (Samuels, 1979). Research indicates that repeated readings lead not only to improvement in reading the passage but also to improvement in decoding, reading rate, prosodic reading, and comprehension of passages that the reader has not previously seen (Dowhower, 1994; Koskinen & Blum, 1986; Kuhn & Stahl, 2000; National Reading Panel, 2000).

“Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or duty.

It should be offered to them as a precious gift.”

-Kate DiCamillo