Building Reading Proficiency

Having the capacity to read proficiently is a basic skill that affects student learning experiences as well as performance in school. It is of the utmost importance that students become proficient readers in order to be successful throughout their lifetime. The Foundational Skills section of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) addresses three of the key components: phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency as identified by the National Reading Panel (2000). The purpose of this project is to present these foundational skill intervention strategies and activities to elementary teachers in order to support success for their struggling readers. Research has indicated that through the use of differentiated, explicit, and systematic activities targeting specific skills, students could make academic gains in all areas of reading. The project was created to provide teachers with adaptable small group activities that could be used as reading intervention activities. The goal was to provide the teacher with multiple activities and strategies to increase student Reading Foundation Skills as defined by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers (2010), using multiple methods to explicitly teach phonics, phonemic awareness, print awareness, and fluency in small group settings in order to support students' learning and result in stronger phonetic and phonemic skills leading to higher academic scores on reading tasks.