ATPE Online Continuing Professional Education


Mastering the Challenges of Reading

This CPE unit guides you through the Mastering the Challenges of Reading area of the of the All Kinds of Minds® website LearningBase. All Kinds of Minds' mission is to help students who struggle with learning measurably improve their success in school and life (through delivery of its professional development program for K-12 educators, Schools Attuned®). Learn more at http://www.allkindsofminds.org/.

This CPE unit is worth 3 hours credit for certification renewal requirements of the Texas State Board for Educator Certification. As an educator taking this CPE unit, you are held to the honor system and will certify once the unit is completed that you have read the entire text contained in the links to the questionnaire. There are a total of 73 questions.

Click on the links for each section and read the entire text to locate the missing words in the statements.

Introduction

  1. Learning to read is a process that we can make more successful if we understand the underpinnings for mastering reading and if we use strategies and methods to enhance the likelihood that students will learn to read despite the challenges of reading.
     
  2. Reading can be broadly divided into two academic skills: (1) word , or accurate and rapid reading of words, and (2) , understanding the intended message of a written passage.

Word Decoding

  1. Decoding refers to the ability to read single words in isolation. Children must first learn that individual speech , or phonemes, are represented by symbols, or .
     
  2. The ability to identify and combine the sounds that make up words is known as awareness.
      
  3. Mapping sounds to letter is a first step in the reading process.
     
  4. Good reading depends upon a student's rapid and automatic decoding of single words.

Hearing and Playing with Sounds: Impact of Language and Attention

  1. A student's ability to decode words effectively begins with his/her appreciation of sounds and .
     
  2. Rhyming allows students to focus on the individual sounds, or phonemes, in .
     
  3. determination (the ability to focus on important details and filter out non-important details) is especially important when hearing how words rhyme.

Read Helpful Hints for this section to review some strategies to help students develop an awareness of the sounds that provide the basis for words.
  

Blending and Segmenting Sounds: Impact of Memory

  1. Understanding that words are made up of of individual , or phonemes, is a building block for learning to decode, or sound out, individual words.
     
  2. Two important abilities that students must develop are blending and .
     
  3. Blending involves pulling individual sounds or syllables within words; segmenting involves breaking words down into sounds or syllables.
     
  4. Blending and segmenting require a student to the individual elements in mind as the word is created or taken apart.
     
  5. The ability to hold sounds or syllables on a ‘thinking counter space’ is facilitated by a student‘s active working .

Read Helpful Hints for this section to review strategies that help students develop their ability to decode words by focusing on blending and segmenting.