Ask Freddy

Ask Freddy Posted 09/24/2009 Permanent Link

Students who are not quite ready for QuickReads

It’s the beginning of the school year. Our school is using Quick Reads—with all grade levels. Many of my first graders can’t read many words. Some can’t read any. Is it appropriate for first graders who can’t read yet to be using QuickReads?

Freddy’s response:
First of all, I’m delighted to hear of a school that is both committed to students’ reading development AND using QuickReads. Now, let’s look at using QuickReads with first graders ….

We typically don’t think of grade-one classrooms as having the most variation in students’ reading levels but that is, in fact, the case. A recent national analysis provides an estimate of what a typical group of six first graders knows about literacy (Denton & West, 2002). On average, one student in this group has a basic word recognition vocabulary. This child may not be able to read every text but he or she knows enough words to be called “a reader.” Two children are unable to identify the names of enough letters to make reading instruction useful. The other three students in our “national” group of six know letter names and can associate most letter names with their sounds but they haven’t completely grasped the alphabetic principle.

In all likelihood, two of these latter three students will “get it” during the first semester of first grade. The one who doesn’t “get it” and the two who weren’t fluent with letter names on first-grade entry have very different needs compared to the students who have launched into text reading. These differences will become very apparent during the second semester of grade one.

The QuickReads program design recognizes the array of differences in a first-grade cohort. For students who are progressing conventionally (i.e. the “upper” three students in the previous paragraphs), I developed Level A of the QuickReads program. Level A promotes high levels of fluency with the 300 most-frequent words and with particular letter-sound associations. At the same time, students are exposed to critical content in science and social studies. I was particularly intent on giving first graders these opportunities in the second semester of first grade. But we all need to recognize that we have some very talented young students coming to our schools. We do NOT want to shortchange these students. They need experiences that engage them to learn and develop areas of expertise—such as those in QuickReads.

For opportunities with Level A to be useful, students need to have some fundamental word recognition. The students who are on the verge of “getting it” or don’t yet have it need to see many, many books with consistent information about the alphabetic system. I’ve developed two sets of beginning reading texts (Ready Readers and Zip Zoom’s Critical-Word Readers)

Until students have the fundamental ease in reading words that comes from repeated reading of “little books” such as the many texts that are part of Ready Readers and Zip Zoom, reading more extended text is going to be very difficult.

References:
Denton, K., & West, J. (2002). Children’s reading and mathematics achievement in kindergarten and first grade. Washington, DC: NCES. Retrieved on Sept. 23, 2009 here.

Englebretson, R., Hiebert, E., & Juel, C. (2000). Ready Readers. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Scholastic (2006). Zip Zoom’s Critical-Word Readers. New York: Author.