Gimme Five: Creating a Comprehensive Reading Lesson with All the Essential Elements

For a number of students, early failure is highly predictive of later failure, severely limiting the development of skilled reading. Students who do not read fluently generally do not become good readers. In addition, students with inadequate fluency are likely to avoid reading because of fear of failure and negative attitudes--and students who avoid reading have less exposure to ideas and vocabulary in books and may lose academic ground, causing them to be twice disadvantaged. Students who are at risk for reading failure often require comprehensive reading instruction. As reading is the one area where children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds experience some of the greatest failure, it seems clear that reading instruction must be expanded. In 2000, the National Reading Panel issued a report to help parents, educators, and policy makers understand the skills necessary for the successful development of reading. The panel reviewed over 100,000 documents, including hundreds of empirical studies, and identified five key components--phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension--necessary to help children become proficient readers. In this article, the authors demonstrate how a teacher might incorporate all five components of reading into one lesson plan. The preplanning process includes asking some challenging yet necessary questions about the content of the lesson. In designing the lesson itself, the teacher needs to consider the five components of reading and how each will be introduced into the lesson. (Contains 1 table.)