Our STARS members have been very busy in the STARS Room working on the curriculum created for our new West Side Boys & Girls Club Reading Program. One of the major building blocks of future success starts with the ability to read. This is why we have made it our mission to make sure that all members can read by the third grade.
Our new reading program has been broken down in to four categories for each quarter and focuses solely on preparing members to be emergent readers. Quarter One we will focus primarily on alphabet recognition (both lowercase and uppercase) for our kindergartner's. For 1st through 3rd grade our focus will be sight word recognition. We have differentiated these for each grade level. It has been proven that these are 220 sight words that are used in everything we read. In knowing this, we believe that this is important for all emerging readers to not be able to sound these out, but know them from sight. After members have had literacy station practice in sight word recognition they will be assessed on their progress twice a quarter.
In Quarter Two, our focus then turns to phonics. Teaching members how to sound out the words and work on the sounds each letters make is another big milestone on the road to reading. Members will practice reading sentences that include new words as well as the sight words they have learned last quarter. Their abilities will be assessed at the beginning of the quarter and then at the end of the quarter to see how members improve.
When we begin Quarter Three, our focus will then focus on Reading and Reading Comprehension. Member will practice reading by using the building blocks we learned in our past quarter on phonics and then slowly moving into differentiated reading curriculum appropriate for each grade level. Members will then be assessed at the beginning and the end of the quarter to measure their success.
By Quarter Four, our focus will be on comprehension and then switch into reading fluency. Members will be assessed at the beginning and at the end of the quarter to measure their success.
Our hope is to assess all member, but will begin with 25 selected members. Through this process we should be able to identify our non-readers, emergent readers, and beginning/intermediate readers and have data to support what is working and what might need more practice.
We plan to have parent nights to share these findings with our parents as well as highlight and recognize their achievements throughout the year.
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