Essential Reading Elements Paper

Throughout this section I will be examining each of the essential reading elements and will evaluate the degree to which best practices are suggested in the CRP. As a reminder the essential reading elements are phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. I will first start out with examining phonemic awareness and move on to each element.
Phonemic awareness is the first essential reading element that is introduced and taught in this unit. The unit first begins with the practice of looking at photo cards and explaining to the students how each word begins with a specific sound. These sounds match up to certain letters. This practice allows students to start working with letter sounds and learn how when you remove the
This activity allows for students, in the future, to be able sound out words that they do not understand. When students understand that words are made up of specific letter sounds, then they will understand that they can sound out those letters and figure out what word they are reading. Other phonemic awareness practices that are utilized in the CRP are phonemic isolation and phonemic substitution. Both of these practices are vital for student accomplishment because, all together, the practices are the gateway for children to be able to succeed in the other essential reading elements. In the text “Literacy for the 21st Century. A Balanced Approach” written by Gail Tompkins, it states that phonemic awareness is crucial to the reading process. When children have a strong phonemic awareness, they are able to understand how to manipulate sounds in spoken words and apply phoneme-grapheme correspondence and phonics rules, as they read (pg. 39). If children do not have a strong phonemic awareness, then they will be presented with a struggle when it comes to reading, fluency, comprehension, and many other elements essential to reading. Page 151 in the text states “children can be explicitly taught to