Developing and Assessing Reading Skill in a competence based curriculum

* The competence based curriculum empowers learners to focus on mastery of valuable skills, knowledge and attitudes and learn at their own pace. * It is important that teachers understand what is involved in learning to read and how to assess individual children’s development . * Teachers must be aware of the curriculum standards in order to be able to assess their students accordingly.

How do children learn to read?

Letter knowledge: It is the ability to associate sounds with letters. To be successful readers, students will need to be familiar and comfortable with the letters of the alphabet; they should be able to identify them without hesitation or confusion. The ability to quickly identify letters of the alphabet (by whatever means, be it letter name, sound, or a word that begins with the letter) is one of the best predictors of future reading success.

How to assess letter knowledge? * One example of an assessment for letter knowledge is to present a student with a list of letters and ask the student to name each letter. * Another example is to have a student separate the letters from a pile of letters , numbers , and symbols. Students can also be asked to separate and categorize letters by uppercase and lowercase.

Phonological awareness Phonological awareness is defined as an awareness that spoken words are made up of sounds. As mature readers, we are all aware that words are made up of syllables, onsets, rimes, etc. Children, however, are very concrete thinkers, and they tend to be unaware of these abstract characteristics of spoken words. As children learn to rhyme words and learn to pay attention to the first and last sounds in words, they become more able to think about words as abstract entities, and they begin to explore words in ways that will ultimately lay the foundation for developing letter-sound knowledge

The Phonological Awareness assessment is made up of four tasks: Rhyme Perception : students identify rhyming words. Rhyme Production: students are able to generate at least two rhyming words. Phoneme Identity Perception: Identify certain sounds in words. Phoneme Identity Production: students are able to say words that have certain sounds

*Tick the rhyming words: 1. PILL / HILL _______ 2. HEAD / NOSE _______ 3. GAME / NAME _______ 4. LAKE/ MAKE _______ 5. MOON / SPOON _______ 6. FEAR / FAR _______ 7. MOST / TOAST _______ 8. BIKE / BAKE _______ 9. GREEN / GRAIN _______ 10. SNAP / NAP _______

Group the rhyming words: Ten – make – cake – pen – ten – take *Group the rhyming words: Ten – make – cake – pen – ten – take *Odd one out : 1- cat – rat – dog –fat – sat. 2- day – flag – say – pray - play.

Phonemic awareness It is the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words. Phoneme awareness refers to the specific awareness that the basic building blocks of words are phonemes. Students are asked to identify the first or last sound in a word. Students can be asked to break spoken words into parts, or to blend spoken parts of a word into one word. Additionally, a student can count the number of phonemes in a word to demonstrate understanding , or a student can delete or add a phoneme to make a new word.

Decoding It is the process of using letter sound correspondences to recognize words. An assessment that examines a student’s decoding skills looks at a child’s reading accuracy. One example of this type of measure is to present a students with some words and ask them to read each word aloud. Also students can be asked to read phrases, simple sentences or short stories.