Teaching Reading: Elementary (5205) Comprehensive Study Guide

Phonemic Awareness

An auditory and oral skill involving the ability to recognize, isolate, segment, blend, and manipulate individual spoken sound units (phonemes) without written print.

Phonics

Instruction focused on understanding the systematic relationship between spoken sounds (phonemes) and the written letters or letter combinations (graphemes) that represent them.

Morphological Analysis

A strategy for determining word meaning by segmenting multisyllabic words into morphemes, such as roots, prefixes, and suffixes.

Elkonin Boxes

An instructional tool featuring visual boxes that isolate individual phonemes in sequence to support phoneme blending and segmenting.

Frayer Model

A graphic organizer divided into four quadrants that requires students to define a target vocabulary word, describe its characteristics, and give examples and non-examples.

Anticipation Guide

A pre-reading tool featuring agree/disagree statements that activate prior knowledge, set a purpose for reading, and support metacognitive comprehension monitoring.

Dyslexia

A learning disorder characterized by difficulties with phonological processing, decoding, spelling, organizing written ideas, and structural word analysis.

Metacognition

The active process where readers monitor, reflect upon, and regulate their own comprehension while reading.

Continuous Sounds

Consonant and vowel sounds (such as /m/, /s/, and short vowels) that can be prolonged without distortion, making them easier to blend than stop sounds.

Readers' Theater

An oral reading strategy involving repeated script reading that enhances reading fluency, including accuracy, rate, and prosody.

Phonemic Awareness

The auditory understanding that spoken words are made up of individual speech sounds (phonemes) and the ability to manipulate those sounds without written print.

Phonics

An instructional strategy that connects spoken sounds (phonemes) to written letters or groups of letters (graphemes) to teach decoding and encoding.

Morphological Analysis

A word-learning strategy in which students break down words into morphemes (roots, base words, prefixes, and suffixes) to deduce word meaning.

Frayer Model

A four-quadrant graphic organizer used to pre-teach vocabulary by requiring students to write a definition, list characteristics, and provide examples and non-examples.

Anticipation Guide

A pre-reading strategy where students respond to agree/disagree statements related to core concepts before reading and revisit them after reading to verify or modify responses.

Cornell Note-Taking System

A two-column organizer and summary tool that encourages active processing, questioning, and critical thinking while reading content-area materials.

Elkonin Boxes

An instructional tool that uses segmented visual boxes to help students isolate, segment, and blend individual phonemes within words.

Five Essential Components of Reading

The foundational components identified by the National Reading Panel: Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Vocabulary, Fluency, and Comprehension.

Dyslexia Indicators

Neurodevelopmental learning disorder characterized by severe difficulties with phonological processing, structural word analysis, written encoding/spelling, and visual stability of printed text.

Continuous Sounds

Consonant and vowel sounds (such as /m/, /s/, /f/, and short vowels) that can be prolonged without sound distortion, making them easier to segment and blend than stop sounds.