Common Core State Standards

The Foundational Reading Skills

Why the Foundational Skills?

• Explicit and systematic instruction is particularly helpful for students at risk for reading difficulties.

• Children's reading development is dependent on their understanding of the alphabetic principle – the idea that letters and letter patterns represent the sounds of spoken language. Learning that there are predictable relationships between sounds and letters allows children to apply these relationships to both familiar and unfamiliar words, and to begin to read with fluency.

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Foundational Skills of CCSS

• Please read the COI document.

• Note items in the left hand column are directly from CCSS and are end-of-the year expectations.

• The right hand column are the skills and understandings that underpin the outcomes on the left—the prerequisite skills.

• How can you make use of this document in your classroom? AUDIENCE DISCUSSION - SHARING

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Possible Classroom Uses• To ensure systematic, explicit instruction in a scientific,

developmental sequence;

• Place the skills in an EXCEL document to track an entire class across time and to be able to group based upon need;

• To assess student writing and control over “encoding” skills – planning instruction for spelling.

• Accelerating student development (K-5 continuum)

Analyzing Students’ Writing Using the COI Document

What does their writing show us about their control and understanding of the “encoding” of

the alphabetic language?

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Use the document to assess this students’ writing

Where would a teacher start on the continuum with this young writer?

How does the continuum help you assess this writer?

To develop him as a writer, (adding details) –

Why are they sitting at the table? What will they do next?

Add that to your writing, and I’ll be right back.

This child understands words are separated by spaces in print.

Next:-saying words slowly and “hearing” ending sounds.

Assessing Student Writing and Spelling Page 8Decode two-syllable words following basic patterns by breaking the words into syllables;Demonstrate understanding that a vowel team syllable contains two adjacent vowelsbecause

Her Strengths and Next Steps• CONTEXT: This second grade student wrote this in response to a teacher asking

them to write about an animal that lives in one of the habitats they were studying during science.

• STRENGTHS: She has generated an idea about an animal she feels strongly about; she sticks to the topic; she shows a beginning sense of sequencing in her text. She uses the capital letter for “I”.

WHAT DOES SHE NEED TO LEARN NEXT?• She would benefit from seeing different ways to organize factual information. The

teacher may show her different examples of nonfiction animal books. She and her classmates could look at nonfiction text features and try to use them in their own writing (table of contents, captions with pictures, bold words, close-ups, diagrams with labels, an index). She needs to find more information about white sharks, so she has more to say and think about how to organize it in a multi-page format. This would be an effective tie to a nonfiction reading unit. She should be guided to replacing the use of “cool” in describing her subjects with more precise language.

STAND AND STRETCH