Commencement with the end in mind will help y'all set up expectations, measure progress, and create opportunities to celebrate the success of your child. While some subjects (i.e. math) may accept more concrete indicators of progress, areas like reading may not. Creating goals for specific components of reading volition help guide your education and allow you lot to certificate your kid's accomplishments. Hither are some tips for how to set effective reading goals for students.

SMART GOALS

SMART* goals have criteria that make them effective:

  • Southward: Specific
  • M: Measurable
  • A: Achievable/Attainable
  • R: Relevant/Realistic
  • T: Time Bound (Retrieve that a goal without a deadline is a dream!)

Goals can be written in the post-obit format in order to make certain they have all the criteria:

  • By (date), and given (materials, support), my child will be able to (activity) with (caste of accuracy).

For instance, if your child needs a target to develop reading comprehension skills, a reading goal for your educatee might wait something like this:

  • By the end of June, and given a grade-level nonfiction text, my child will exist able to answer multiple choice reading comprehension questions with at least 9 out of x correct.

Remember that once y'all create a goal for the year, you tin break down the long-term goals into shorter-term goals chosen benchmarks. Instead of increasing the number or percent correct, you lot can also build your benchmarks on other factors. For example, you lot can increment the grade level of the text or decrease the level of back up provided when reading the text. Yous can increase the number of words read per minute or decrease the number of errors.

Using the overall goal above, and based on where your kid is at the starting time of the year, your benchmarks might exist something like this:

  • Past mid-November, my kid will be able to use context clues and other strategies to make up one's mind the meaning of unknown words and the signal of view.
  • By the end of January, and given a grade-level nonfiction text, my child will be able to recall the main idea and the details that support it 70% of the time
  • By mid-April, my child will be able to verbally summarize paragraphs and capacity accurately 4 out of five trials

If you lot are focusing on a more complicated job, you tin can break downwards the task into parts/subtasks and prepare a benchmark for each. Basically, you want to create goals and benchmarks that you lot tin measure at each endpoint to judge your child's progress.

READING COMPONENTS

Rather than targeting reading "in general," you lot should set good reading goals for students that are specific enough to provide you with strategies towards helping struggling readers. The National Reading Panel, in 2000, released a report documenting 5 essential components to reading, known as the "Big 5":

  1. Phonemic Awareness—understanding that spoken words are made up of private sounds (called "phonemes")
  2. Phonics—understanding that the sounds in spoken language relate to letters
  3. Fluency—ability to read with speed and accuracy
  4. Vocabulary—understanding of individual give-and-take meanings
  5. Reading Comprehension—power to get significant from text

Phonemic Sensation and Phonics are often areas where skillful reading goals for students are needed for very young or developing readers. Fluency and reading comprehension are more than relevant for older or more than experienced readers. Vocabulary development can brainstorm at any age and go on throughout the lifespan.

SMART READING GOALS

Let's look at some examples of reading goals within each of the "Big v" components:

  1. Phonemic Awareness:
    By the end of June, and given i-syllable spoken words, my child volition be able to intermission downwardly each word into its sounds/phonemes, with at to the lowest degree eight out of 10 correct.
  2. Phonics:
    Past the end of June, and given cards showing upper-case and lower-instance letters, my child will be able to proper noun the letter of the alphabet and its audio with 100% accurateness for all letters of the alphabet.
  3. Reading Fluency:
    By the end of June, and given a grade-level fiction text, my child will exist able to read aloud at 25 words per minute with no more 5 decoding errors.
  4. Vocabulary:
    By the finish of June, and given a listing of twenty grade-level vocabulary words, my child will be able to choice the definition of the words from four options with at least seventy% correct.
  5. Reading Comprehension:
    Past the stop of June, and given a grade-level nonfiction text, my child will be able to answer multiple selection reading comprehension questions with at least ix out of 10 correct.

In the next coming manufactures, we will look at strategies for improving your child's success which can lead to an increase in reading scores, based on the goals you have written, inside each of the "Big 5" essential components of reading.