Welcome to Module 2 Grades 4/5

Phonemic Awareness

As a reminder, phonemic awareness is a child's ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words. Though it is typical that children in 4th and 5th grade have mastered this foundational skill, children that struggle with reading or have a reading issue may need some more support in this area.

• Review the resources below.

• Choose 1 activity to complete with your child in phonemic awareness and 1 activity in phonics.

• Fill out the parent survey to share what you did and its impact.

This article from understood.org shares how parents can support older children that need help with phonemic awareness skills.

Developmental Sequence of Phonological Skills

If your child does struggle with phonemic awareness, this chart is a helpful tool to help you to determine where your child is at. If your child is struggling with any of these skills visit the toolkits for grades K-1 and 2-3 to see activities you can do to develop these skills.

Sound Pronunciation

Being intentional about how you pronounce sounds with your child is important. Have you ever heard of the terms "stop sound" or "continuous" sound"? This blog describes the difference between the two and why it is important to pay attention to this when children learn to read. The video below is also useful. Watch as this teacher models how to correctly pronounce consonant sounds.

Multisyllabic Words

As stated on Scholastic.com "When children begin to learn how to read, they are greeted with simple, known words: cat, mom, and like. As they move through the grades, they are soon confronted with words such as habitat, subaquatic, and unrecognizable — words that can leave their heads swimming! As students develop in their reading ability, they need to notice word parts, or "orthographic chunks," to help them decode these multisyllabic mysteries. For some students this is quite easy and natural; for others, it is a daunting task. Much can be done to help students' progress to the stage at which they readily notice larger parts of longer words to ease the decoding burden." This article can help you understand how you can support your child to attach these complex skills using both phonemic awareness and phonics.

Phonics

Decoding

According to greatschools.org, "By fourth grade, your child’s decoding abilities should be strong. Decoding is being able to use patterns to figure out new words and decipher their separate sounds. This year, your fourth grader will need more sophisticated decoding and fluency abilities in order to tackle more challenging texts, from novels and nonfiction books to magazine articles and online research." Here are some specific decoding skills your child will work on:

• Putting together compound words (e.g. a snake with a rattle is a rattlesnake).
• Figuring out the meaning when with common prefixes and suffixes are added to a base word (e.g. When you add pre- to heats, what does it mean? What does the suffix -ly do to the meaning of sharp?)
• Decoding dozens of multisyllabic words, from com-pen-sate to sy-no-nym, as well as read grade-level irregularly spelled words, such as though and Wednesday.

Decoding involves sounding out words and blending words together. However, as stated on understood.org, not all words are decodable. "Readers must know how to tackle and instantly recognize two types of words to read fluently. One is decodable words; the other is non-decodable words. For kids with reading issues, including dyslexia, learning to read both types of words can be a challenge." This chart will help you to understand both and know what to do to help your child.

Though not all words follow the rules of phonics, many do, and it is important to help your child to practice and understand these rules. Here is a great resource to review the rules of phonics.

As upper elementary students read text that is more and more complex, this blog shares 4 decoding strategies that you can prompt your child to try when they are having difficulty with decoding a word.