Rationale
I started with seventeen students in my class, ten boys and seven girls. Thirteen of my students lived in the school neighborhood and the other four students optioned in from other areas of the metropolitan area. We had a high mobility rate due to our proximity to Offutt Air Force Base. Fourteen out of my seventeen had one or more parents employed by a branch of the military. This means many of my students had moved previously and/or had parents deployed. Students often miss school when the whole family is relocated and when one parent is approaching deployment. This leads to a disruption in their learning and instruction. My students have a wide range of abilities. Two of my students were a part of the Student Assistance Team (SAT) program. The SAT team is a group of teachers and school administrators that work together to develop goals and an action plan for those goals to help students who are struggling. One of these students had both behavior and language goals. The other students only had behavior and attention goals. None of my students had an Individualized Education Plan. Four of my students met with the reading specialist on a daily basis for Leveled Literacy Intervention.
The data I collected from my students showed a need in reading, specifically decoding. I had ten students reading below grade level using the Fountas & Pinnell leveling system. These ten students often got frustrated when reading and gave up easily when they came to a word they didn’t know or could not easily sound out. Their disengagement in reading was leading to slow growth (an average of one level in the first quarter) and a dislike for reading. Seven of my students were below level on the Fall MAP Reading Test and nine of my students missed one or more phonics questions on the last reading weekly benchmark test. This showed me that the need is in phonics instruction, not just applying phonics skills into the context of reading a book. My students struggled with sounding out words (associating incorrect sounds to letters) which led to frustration when reading. I was frequently reteaching the same blends, digraphs, and spelling patterns and they did not appear to be “sticking” in my students’ brains.
The research showed that a combination of code-based and meaning-based approach to teaching reading is most beneficial. I chose Words Their Way as my meaning-based approach because it is widely used in schools across the U.S. Since I am teaching in a school on base, we have a highly mobile population and I wanted to use a system that all students would be familiar with, even students that move in in the middle of the school year. 50% of the students I had move in during this study had used Words Their Way in their previous school. This familiarity made the transition much easier for those students. I chose Reading Horizons as my code-based approach because it is research based, was available within my district, and came highly recommended by other teachers in the district. It is fast paced and has many pneumonic devices to help the phonics rules "stick" in students' brains so I thought it would be a good fit for my class.
The data I collected from my students showed a need in reading, specifically decoding. I had ten students reading below grade level using the Fountas & Pinnell leveling system. These ten students often got frustrated when reading and gave up easily when they came to a word they didn’t know or could not easily sound out. Their disengagement in reading was leading to slow growth (an average of one level in the first quarter) and a dislike for reading. Seven of my students were below level on the Fall MAP Reading Test and nine of my students missed one or more phonics questions on the last reading weekly benchmark test. This showed me that the need is in phonics instruction, not just applying phonics skills into the context of reading a book. My students struggled with sounding out words (associating incorrect sounds to letters) which led to frustration when reading. I was frequently reteaching the same blends, digraphs, and spelling patterns and they did not appear to be “sticking” in my students’ brains.
The research showed that a combination of code-based and meaning-based approach to teaching reading is most beneficial. I chose Words Their Way as my meaning-based approach because it is widely used in schools across the U.S. Since I am teaching in a school on base, we have a highly mobile population and I wanted to use a system that all students would be familiar with, even students that move in in the middle of the school year. 50% of the students I had move in during this study had used Words Their Way in their previous school. This familiarity made the transition much easier for those students. I chose Reading Horizons as my code-based approach because it is research based, was available within my district, and came highly recommended by other teachers in the district. It is fast paced and has many pneumonic devices to help the phonics rules "stick" in students' brains so I thought it would be a good fit for my class.
Research
For decades researchers have recognized the importance of strong reading skills and the primary grades as a critical time to develop the skills necessary to read fluently. Everyone agrees on the importance of teaching reading but there is no universally agreed upon method for teaching this critical skill. In the late 1990’s, the National Reading Panel (NRP) recognized five areas of an effective reading program: phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension (Rightmyer, McIntyre, & Petrosko, 2006; Zugel, 2012). This provides educators with the “ingredients” they need to teach reading but there is no designated best practice “recipe” for how to effectively teach these five areas of reading instruction.