Whats Basic in Beginning Reading?
Finding Common Ground by Dorothy S. Strickland Most teachers who understand the importance of providing a meaningful and balanced literacy program would agree to the following points: (1) Skills and meaning should never be separated; (2) Instruction should be planned, deliberate in application and proceed in an orderly manner; (3) Student need should determine in-depth instruction on a certain skill or strategy; (4) Ongoing documentation and monitoring should be used to determine both the order in which skills should be addressed and the intensity of skill instruction; and (5) Teachers should be familiar with the language arts objectives the district requires at their grade level, and at the grade levels above and below them, to ensure that goals and objective are tracked in an integrated manner. In practice then, many teachers who are proponents of holistic approaches also include strong word-recognition programs that make use of phonics, and those who advocate for phonics programs ar
