Course Syllabus

Reading is the single most important social factor in American life today. The more you read, the more you know. The more you know, the smarter you grow. The smarter you grow, the longer you stay in school. The longer you stay in school, the more you earn. The more you earn, the better your children will do in school and the longer you will live. So, if you hook a child with reading, you influence not only his financial circumstances, but also those of the next generation. On the other hand, the less you read, the less you know. The less you know, the sooner you drop out of school. The sooner you drop out, the more likely you are to be poor, and the greater chances of going to jail. Eighty-two percent of prison inmates are school dropouts, and sixty percent are illiterate. (Jim Trelease, 1995).

In 1997, Congress asked the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the US Department of Education to form a panel of experts to review the research on teaching reading. In 2000, the panel, known as the National Reading Panel (NPR) issued their findings in the report "Teaching Children to Read"/ The panel published a list of five essential components of reading instruction. These components are known as the "Five Big Ideas in Reading". 

Ohio's Third Grade Reading Guarantee is a program to identify students from Kindergarten through Grade 3 that are behind in reading. Schools will provide help and support to make sure students are on track for reading success by the end of Grade 3. The Ohio Department of Education provides policy guidance, instructional tools, and resources on the Third Grade Reading Guarantee. 

Students who are not “on-track” based on the fall DIBELS receive extra, targeted support that is monitored through use of the Reading Improvement and Monitoring Plan (RIMP). The RIMP will be maintained until the end of your child’s current grade level. If your child is in grades 1-2 at the start of the next school and scores “on track,” then no RIMP will be developed, as your child has been determined to be on track for reading success. If your child starts grade 3 next fall, your child must attain an “on-grade level score,” as determined by the Ohio Department of Education, on the Fall 2016 or Spring 2017 administration of the Ohio State Test for Reading.

DIBELS stands for Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills. It is an assessment system designed to assess all students' progress. It is not a reading program. The students are tested three times a year; Fall, Mid-Year, and Spring. Here is what DIBELS measures:

• Letter Naming Fluency: Students are presented with a page of uppercase and lowercase letters and are asked to name as many as they can.
• Initial Sound Fluency: This test measures a child's ability to recognize and produce the initial sound in an orally presented word.
• Phoneme Segmentation Fluency: This test measures a child's ability to segment three- and four-phoneme words into individual phonemes fluently. This is a good predictor of later reading achievement.
• Nonsense Words Fluency: This is an individually administered test of the alphabetic principle, including letter-sound correspondence and the ability to blend letters into words in which letters represent their most common sounds.
• Oral Reading Fluency: This test measures a child's accuracy and fluency with a connected text.