Reading is an amazing skill that will serve our students for the rest of their lives!  Learning to read, and becoming better readers, is both exciting and challenging.  One of the most important things you can do for your child is help them develop a lifelong love of reading.  As you read out loud to them, provide them with independent reading material, and model reading in everyday life, you are helping them discover the important role that text plays in our lives.

The Five Essential Components of Reading 
(From US Department of Education)

Reading with children and helping them practice specific reading components can dramatically improve their ability to read. Scientific research shows that there are five essential components of reading that children must be taught in order to learn to read. Adults can help children learn to be good readers by systematically practicing these five components:

• Recognizing and using individual sounds to create words, or phonemic awareness. Children need to be taught to hear sounds in words and that words are made up of the smallest parts of sound, or phonemes.
• Understanding the relationships between written letters and spoken sounds, or phonics. Children need to be taught the sounds individual printed letters and groups of letters make. Knowing the relationships between letters and sounds helps children to recognize familiar words accurately and automatically, and "decode" new words.
• Developing the ability to read a text accurately and quickly, or reading fluency. Children must learn to read words rapidly and accurately in order to understand what is read. When fluent readers read silently, they recognize words automatically. When fluent readers read aloud, they read effortlessly and with expression. Readers who are weak in fluency read slowly, word by word, focusing on decoding words instead of comprehending meaning.
• Learning the meaning and pronunciation of words, or vocabulary development. Children need to actively build and expand their knowledge of written and spoken words, what they mean and how they are used.
• Acquiring strategies to understand, remember and communicate what is read, or reading comprehension strategies. Children need to be taught comprehension strategies, or the steps good readers use to make sure they understand text. Students who are in control of their own reading comprehension become purposeful, active readers.

Metacognitive Thinking Skills  
(ongoing throughout elementary school)

In the Carlisle School District, our students will learn the following Metacognitive thinking skills, and practice them for many school years to come.  These skills are essential in good reading, and you can practice them while you're reading at home!

Summarizing: The ongoing ability to state the meaning of the text in a shortened form.  A summary should include key details from the text.
Making Inferences: The ongoing ability to make predictions and draw conclusions using background knowledge and details from the text (including the picture clues, title, key words).
Monitoring Understanding: The consistent ability to make sure the words read are correct and make sense.  The consistent ability to check if you understand what you are reading.
Making Connections: The ongoing ability to make connections between what is read to your own life, other texts, and the world.
Questioning: The ongoing ability to create and answer questions while you read.
Visualizing: The ongoing ability to create a picture or movie in your head from the words on the page.
Synthesizing: The ongoing ability to make meaning from the text by using the other six thinking strategies.