1	Reading First At Western Wayne School District
2	Reading First in Pennsylvania A 6-year grant designed to improve students’ reading skills from kindergarten through 3^rd grade. Over 2 million dollars allocated to Western Wayne School District over the 6-year period. Monies are used to buy new reading programs and materials, hire reading coaches, and provide professional development to teachers.
3	What have we done so far? Purchased new reading programs for grades Kindergarten through 5. Hired 3 reading coaches. Provided extensive professional development opportunities to teachers. Subscribed to the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) assessment and progress monitoring system. Implemented the Get Ready to Read screening tool in pre-kindergarten.
4	What does this mean for your child? All grade levels K through 5 have a 90-minute reading block each day to focus on the five basic elements of beginning reading skills. The five basic elements are phonemic awareness, alphabetic principles, vocabulary, reading fluency, and comprehension. All pre-kindergarten students are exposed to early literacy activities including book awareness, phonemic awareness activities, and activities to promote letter-sound identification.
5	"Students are screened 3 times..." Students are screened 3 times each year to identify those in need of strategic or intensive intervention services. Students in need of increased intervention receive intensive learning opportunities and are monitored once or twice each month with the DIBELS progress monitoring tools.
6	What does the DIBELS assessment measure? Letter Identification Fluency Initial Sound Identification Fluency Phoneme Segmentation Fluency Nonsense Word Decoding Fluency Oral Reading Fluency
7	Yearly Outcome Data The following slides contain descriptions of the DIBELS subtests and summaries of student outcome data as measured by the DIBELS assessment in May of each school year. The numbers on the left indicate the percentage of students performing in each category.
8	What is Phoneme Segmentation? Ask your child to tell you the individual sounds in a word. “Tell me the sounds you hear in the word dog.” Your child should be able to tell you the sounds, /d/, /o/, /g/.
9	Kindergarten progress with phoneme segmentation skills.
10	What is Nonsense Word Decoding? Reading nonsense words is a true measure of your child’s ability to decode unknown words because children cannot rely on memory to guess at words they do not recognize.
11	Examples of Nonsense Word Decoding Vum Meb Yat Vif Loj Nuk
12	Kindergarten progress with nonsense word fluency skills.
13	First Grade progress with nonsense word fluency skills.
14	What is Oral Reading Fluency? The DIBELS oral reading fluency task measures how quickly and accurately a child can read a 1-minute grade level passage. Three 1-minute probes are administered and your child’s median score (the middle score) is recorded in words per minute.
15	First Grade progress with oral reading fluency skills.
16	Second Grade progress with oral reading fluency skills.
17	Third Grade progress with oral reading fluency skills.
18	Fourth Grade progress with oral reading fluency skills.
19	Fifth Grade progress with oral reading fluency skills.
20	What can you do to help your child develop reading skills? Read to your child every day. Ask your child to read out loud to you and provide unknown words when your child hesitates. Develop your child’s vocabulary by explaining unknown words or concepts throughout your day. Communicate with your child’s teacher.
21	Contact Information Kristin Johnson – School Psychologist 570-937-3010 Ms. Ellen Faliskie – Elementary Principal – Reading First Coordinator 570-698-5616