Early Reading Modules
Phonemic awareness (PA) and Word Identification (WID) are two foundational skills in reading. These modules focus on ensuring that students are properly prepared for our Reading Fluency modules. Here is a list of all the modules we offer as well as what they cover.
Three PA tasks are available and, if assigned, students see these early reading modules under the READING tab in the top middle of the page.
These three modules are foundational for early reading and are usually addressed in kindergarten, along with Long and Short Vowels and Sight Words.
- Isolating Sounds: Isolating initial and final phonetic sounds
- Blending: Producing blended word-part sounds
- Segmenting: Segmenting word-part sounds
In these modules, students are asked to identify sounds with no words (graphemes). We provide three options: (a) the correct sound, (b) a sound that is close to it, and (c) a sound that is not at all close to it. These three options are randomly rotated in their order of placement: left, middle, and right.
- Isolating Sounds: Students are asked what sound is at the beginning of the word “Hi.” And the options they can choose from are verbalizations of “Wh,” “H,” and “ZZ.” These are all sounds that students can click on multiple times to hear
- Blending: Students are given the sounds of phonemes and they need to put them together to form a word. For example, they may hear the sound of “bl” and then the sound of “oom” with three options to select the word that represents these two phonemes blended: ‘bloom’, ‘black’, and ‘cream’.
- Segmenting: A word is read aloud, and students need to select a new word without a phoneme from within the word. For example, “What is the word ‘wife’ without the sound f.” The options for answers are, ‘wise’, ‘why’, and ‘wind’.
Two other kindergarten modules are available that represent early Word Identification (WID) modules.
- Long and Short Vowels: Recognizing basic short and long vowel sounds.
- Sight Words: Recognizing high-frequency words.
Expanded Description of Activities
- Long and Short Vowels: Students are presented a word verbally (no graphemes) and they need to select from the list of words that represent the verbalized word. For this example, if the verbalized word is ‘jest’. students can choose ‘juice’, ‘just’, or the correct answer ‘jest’. The words are NOT played audibly as they need to recognize the words (graphemes) associated with that verbalization.
• Sight Words: Students are presented a word read aloud and three options that represent (a) that word, (b) a word close to it and, (c) a word not at all close to it.
The remaining modules follow the same administration formats as these last two modules, with the word read aloud (no graphemes) and then the student prompted with “Which word is…”. Again, (a) one displayed word is correct, (b) one displayed word is close to the same sounds, and (c) one displayed word is not close.
• Vowel Teams: Recognizing complex vowel teams.
• Blends: Recognizing consonant blends.
• Digraphs: Recognizing consonant digraphs.
• Tricky Words: Recognizing advanced vowel and consonant patterns.
• Pseudo Words: Decoding nonsense (pseudo-words) words.
