so even though this training is about comprehension we're going to spend a few minutes talking about some of the other components related to reading because when students have difficulty comprehending what they're reading or what they're listening to we immediately jump and assume it's oh I have weak comprehension skills but it may actually be that they have problems in some of the other areas of reading that by having problems in those area areas it's affecting their ability to get to the ultimate goal of reading which is comprehension so what I'm going to do now and I'm going to use these colored ribbons here I'm going to go through something that's often called the five components of reading and I'm going to demonstrate them or talk about them with you using these colored ribbons because after I review all them I want you to see how they all end up working together like strands in a row so let's begin with the very first one which is phonemic awareness now phonemic awareness is something that is if it's when it's taught it's usually taught in pre-k K first second grade most students beyond those grades never need any instruction in phonemic awareness however there are some older students especially those that have language based learning disabilities that that's a significant cause of their struggling they're their reason for struggling and so you may sometimes have older students that need work in this but primarily this is something that gets taught when children are very young now what is phonemic awareness it has a the root word phoneme in it and a phoneme is what we call the smallest unit of sound that you can make in a language and by the way there are 44 phonemes in the English language so each of those sounds when you combined them together end up making words and when we hear a word we don't realize we're doing it but when we hear a word we are parsing out those individual sounds we're hearing those sounds we automatically glom them to and it stands for a word and then it allows us to start thinking about the word and going to what we know the word means etc now when you ask students to do a phonemic awareness task it's something that you could do with the lights out meaning you don't have to have sound for this so I'm going to do a little practice activity and what I want you to do right now is I want you to close your eyes and I'm going to say a word and then I'm going to ask you some questions so close your eyes okay so the word is cat what's the first sound you hear what's the last sound you hear what's the middle sound you hear ah now if we put them all together where do we get we get cat okay now what if we were to exchange and the last sound that sound and put a sound there what would you hear you now would have the word cap so you just did a phonemic awareness activity you were able to identify isolate the sounds in the word also put them together you were also able to manipulate the sounds of the word and so that's all that phonemic awareness is now why is this related to reading because since ours is an alphabetic language and we use letters to represent sounds in the words that we speak if students aren't able to detect those sounds those nuances in the sounds and pull them apart and put them back together then it's going to be really hard for them to learn the system of our alphabetic system which is letters or combinations of letters represent those sounds so that's why it's so essential so that's our first building block the second one and we'll use red to represent this this is phonics now when you move to phonics you have to do phonics with the lights on because you need to see so the big difference here is that with phonemic awareness the focus is sounds and with phonics the focus is letters that represent those sounds so you know we all know that in English we have 26 letters in our alphabet but I mentioned that we have 44 sounds we can make so there's a disjoint there we only have 26 letters but they need to represent 44 sounds and the way we do that is that we sometimes combine letters so if I combine TCH and that makes a sound or ch can make a sound so that's how we do it now the fascinating thing and this is what makes phonics so hard for our students and that is that because ours is a language that layers many languages on top of each other over hundreds of years as we added new languages we often kept the original Spelling's and so we end up now with this unbelievable number of ways to spell those 44 sounds there are more than 200 and that's why spelling is so difficult in the English language okay so phonemic awareness phonics we see the combination we see how important they are how they're related but again the question is what does this have to do with comprehension well these two along with fluency which we're going to talk about next are the components that we put in the category called decoding the ability to when you see a word figure out what it is and to be able to do that accurately and rapidly and hopefully without having to think about it and that's a precursor to being able to then think about the information that you're reading now again like with phonemic awareness this is something that usually by the end of third grade we want kids to have this whole system figure it out you know the end of third grade beginning of fourth grade so that they know the basic combinations how the letters represent the sounds and when they see these words they automatically get ok and you want them to get to the point where they're fluent in doing that so that brings us to our third component we use the yellow ribbon for this if you're wondering why I'm I'm weaving them together it's because in the end I want you to show show you how even though we're talking about them as separate entities that in the end they all work together like the strands in a rope when we end up reading okay so fluency what can we say about fluency well first let's think about fluency as something not just associated with reading right so whenever you learn something new let's say you're learning to play golf or last year I took up knitting right you're not good at it at first and what is it that makes us good it it's the practice and we want the practice to be guided practice right so I'm not going to learn to play golf if somebody just tells me here's how you swing the golf club and they explain it to me or I'm not really going to learn to get good at knitting if somebody says oh here's how it works you take two needles and you you know you can go left then you go right and then you write I need to number one watch somebody doing it that's what we'd call modeling preferably if the person can actually think it aloud while they're showing me that would be great but even that that's that's just where I learn initially how to do something it's the practice that makes it work right so we've been if I have the greatest golf instructor you know or even if I'm able to go to a knitting class and they do an excellent job of teaching you how to knit when I go home I look up at the ceiling and I go now I don't know what to do and it's the practice that makes it work and it's the guided practice because that's the other thing because if I start practicing the sweat the golf swing the wrong way and and and you know my balls are going way to the left or way to the right and I don't get somebody to guide me and show me how to adjust that I'm not going to learn to improve that golf swing so this is the exact same approach to reading the way we get better at that that decoding skill that ability when we see words regardless of how they long they are - as quickly and efficiently as possible decode the word look at those letters translate them into the sounds translate it into a word so we can start focusing on the meaning we want that to be as rapid and automatic as possible we want to be as accurate because we don't want to miss read the words and so a lot of folks will think about reading fluency as something that involves accuracy and speed but it's not just those two things because we've all seen kids who read very rapidly and then they're done at the end and they can't remember anything and that's because they're not focusing on also trying to make sense out of what they're reading so there are usually two other factors or components to fluency and those are what we call profit E and prosity is just a fancy way of seeing the sort of thing song and the pauses that we make when we're speaking it's it's the recognition when you see a comma that it's time to stop and pause a minute and then in addition to prosody we're also looking for with some understanding so the definition of fluency reading fluency is to read words accurately quickly with porosity and with an eye for comprehension so these three components all come under the area of what we call decoding and fluency it's the part that really doesn't have much to do with making meaning when we're reading it's the sort of rudimentary aspects that again by the time kids leave fourth or fifth grade you want this to be down pat okay so now let's think about these last two which are vocabulary and comprehension skills these are the components of reading that what make reading what it's all about which is being able to read to make meaning so this first one which I'm using blue to represent is vocabulary and by the way vocabulary and comprehension are completely connected they're like you know love and marriage soup and sandwich go together right so but vocabulary plays a very unique role one of the findings that we've had from research and it's been replicated over and over again is that when we're reading something if we're not familiar with at least 90 five percent of the words in a piece of text that were reading it's going to affect our comprehension and I know that that seems like a pretty high number but a lot of the words in text are words that don't make much meaning like ah and the okay but it's those really key important words content related words that make make up the meaning and all you need is to not know what a few of those are and it's going to throw everything off so vocabulary is very much related to comprehension and if students have weaknesses in that vocabulary that's really going to throw their meaning off now let's go to our last one which is what this training is all about right which is comprehension and I'm using our multicolored ribbon here because comprehension is really relies on all these other things that we've been talking about so in this case we want to ask ourselves what is comprehension and even that can be broken down into several components several of which we're going to focus on in our training for the keikain today but several that are equally as important but not necessarily something that we're going to cover in the tree so the four sub components if you will of comprehension are vocabulary which we talked about already strategies metacognitive strategies so that's things like you know in the routine things like how do you find main ideas and state them how do you take notes how do you write summaries how do you generate questions so those are all considered strategies that good readers use so we got vocabulary we've got strategies another one is background knowledge if you come to read something and you have no background knowledge in it whatsoever it's going to affect your comprehension the more you already know about the subject you're reading about the easier it's going to be to make sense of what you're reading because first of all it means you're going to have more vocabulary that you know but you're also going to have what we call a schema a collection of ideas already related to that topic and you can hook this new information on to it so that strategies and the last one is text structures and this is something that most folks don't think about much as it relates to comprehension but text structures start right at the sentence level so when we're reading something and if it has a really long complex you know compound sentence in it sometimes the fact that it's that difficult affects our comprehension so a lot of your students who are having trouble understanding what they're reading it might not be that they can't understand the concepts it's that the language that's being used and what they're reading is so complex that they can't get at the meaning so those are the four components of comprehension so let's wrap the whole thing up together now so I've shared with you five components of reading here and I want you to think about them as strands in a row now what happens in a real row if one or two of the strands break or afraid it hurts the integrity of the whole rope and so that's how I want you to think about these that you know even though we can talk about them as separate components in reality when we read we do them all together and a good reader flows between these effortlessly they're tapping into decoding skills they're they're using their fluency they're going a word meeting and ultimately to larger meeting so again the reason I'm sharing these components with you is even though we're going to focus primarily on comprehension here when you see students who struggle with that you want to stop and ask yourself is the problem really their comprehension you know that they don't have strategies or enough background knowledge or text structure or is it something else that they can't decode the words or they can't do them fluently enough or could it be that they just don't know what enough of the vocabulary is so that's the five components of reading