What Do I Teach?
One word: Literacy! This one word encompasses the foundation of Reading.
This includes Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension.
More information about each of these topics can be found on this page.
In addition to teaching, I aim to inspire and develop confidence in my client's literacy skills and increase...or even start a love of reading!
The ability to hear, identify, manipulate, and substitute phonemes—the smallest units of sound that can differentiate meaning—in spoken words. Essentially, students begin by learning individual phonemes, then joining phonemes, and finally, building words.
The ability to read text accurately, quickly, and expressively, either to oneself or aloud. Fluency is the ability to read as well as one speaks and to make sense of what is being read without having to stop or pause to decode words.
The ability to understand, remember, and make meaning of what has been read—this is the purpose for reading. Students with developed reading comprehension abilities can predict, infer, make connections, and analyze what is being read. All of the pillars of Reading are their own part, but without comprehension...it remains disconnected. Comprehension allows the flowers of literacy to bloom as it gives meaning and purpose to what is being read.
The ability to understand that there is a predictable relationship between phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (the letters that represent those sounds in written language) in order to associate written letters with the sounds of spoken language. This is where students begin to “crack the code” on reading. Phonics instruction teaches students how to build relationships between sounds and letters or letter combinations and how to use those relationships to build words.
The growing, stored compilation of words that students understand and use in their conversation (oral vocabulary) and recognize in print (reading vocabulary). Most vocabulary is learned through everyday listening in conversations, reading aloud, or independent reading.
