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Presented by Julie Coiro
Literacy Initiative Professional Development Series at SERC
October 13, 2001




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Connecticut's Blueprint for Reading Achievement Today's session will focus on guiding teachers to evaluate and use online resources to enhance comprehensive literacy instruction as outlined in Connecticut's Blueprint for Reading Achievement: The Report of the Early Reading Success Panel, which was published in October of 2000.  A panel of early literacy experts in state of Connecticut has concluded that  "a comprehensive curriculum of reading instruction at the K-3 level should address the following reading and reading-related competencies: word-identification skills (learning how to read individual words, including developing phonological and phonemic awareness), fluent and accurate word identification in context (reading words in text), comprehension (including oral-language comprehension as well as reading comprehension), spelling and writing.  These five areas and their components must be standard in any K-3 reading curriculum."  (p. 26)

Early Literacy Terms
Let's take some time to review some important terms associated with early literacy skills:

• Phonological Awareness is an understanding of the sounds of language, including rhyming, blending, segmentation, deletion, and substitution in sound, syllables, and words. It is an auditory set of skills.
• Phonemic Awareness is an understanding that the spoken word (speech) is composed of a sequence of smaller individual sounds (phonemes); it is purely an auditory skill.
• Phonemes are the units of sound that are represented by the letters of the alphabet.
• Alphabetic principle is an understanding that written spellings systematically represent phonemes.  Sounds in spoken words have a systematic relationship to the letters in printed words.
• Phonics is instruction that emphasizes letter-sound correspondences, spelling-sound correspondences, and the alphabetic principle.  These are visual skills that require knowledge of letter sounds and the ability to decode printed words.

Phonological Awareness
The chart below (based on a model by Dechant, 1993) outlines the progression of skills that are represented under the "umbrella" of phonological awareness.  All of the skills should be taught within the context of auditory language first, and then slowly, instruction can progress to applying these skills to written letters and words.