How Read Naturally GATE Addresses Common Core State Standards

Read Naturally GATE is well-suited to support core reading programs and address the Foundational Skills and Reading and Language Anchor Standards as described below.

FOUNDATIONAL SKILLS

Phonological Awareness

Standard: Demonstrate understanding of spoken words, syllables, and sounds (phonemes).

Each lesson in Read Naturally GATE begins with phonological awareness activities.
Students are asked to:

• Listen for the sounds in words to determine whether a word contains the sound.
• Make a word by blending sounds together.
• Pronounce, blend, and segment syllables in spoken words.
• Isolate and pronounce the initial, medial vowel, and final sounds in three-phoneme words.
• Distinguish long and short vowels in spoken single-syllable words.
• Orally produce single-syllable words by blending sounds (phonemes), including blends and digraphs.

Phonics and Word Recognition

Standard: Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis in decoding words.

Read Naturally GATE lessons teach phonics and word analysis skills using letter-sound correspondences, nonfiction stories, and word lists. Students read along with the teacher to learn unknown words. Students then apply their skills through independent repeated reading of stories and word lists until they can read both the high-frequency words and the words with the phonics patterns with automaticity.
In Read Naturally GATE, students:

• Master the sounds of letters and letter combinations, including blends and digraphs.
• Decode phonetically regular one- and two-syllable words easily.
• Learn to read high-frequency words with automaticity.
• Analyze and read words with inflected endings.
• Spell short, regular phonetic words.

Fluency

Standard: Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension.

Read Naturally GATE lessons develop fluency and emphasize reading for meaning. Small groups of students are directly taught to follow the Read Naturally Strategy to improve fluency using nonfiction stories and phonics word lists. Each student works through a set of carefully designed steps to reach a goal: to accurately and expressively read text at an appropriate rate, self-correcting when necessary. Students answer comprehension questions to demonstrate understanding.

READING STANDARDS FOR INFORMATIONAL TEXT

Key Ideas and Details

Standard: Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.

Read Naturally GATE includes comprehension questions that require students to attend to key ideas and details in the text. These questions also require that the student use a word with the featured phonics pattern in the answer.

Standard: Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas.

Read Naturally GATE requires students to be accountable for meaning by including comprehension questions and summarizing activities. Each story has questions about main idea or details and students retell the story.

Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity

Standard: Read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently.

In Read Naturally GATE, a small group of students work in a challenging level of nonfiction stories to become proficient readers. Read Naturally GATE stories are carefully grouped by level according to the Common Core Standards criteria of text complexity: quantitative measures, qualitative measures, and text/reader considerations. The levels are sequenced so that the text complexity gradually increases as the student moves to higher levels.

The stories in the lower levels are short and easy to understand, the ideas are explicitly stated, and the vocabulary is familiar. At each successive level, the stories become longer and more complex, the ideas require more inference, and the vocabulary becomes more difficult.

Lexile measures are available for each Read Naturally GATE level (see Phonics Levels 0.8, 1.3, 1.8).

LANGUAGE STANDARDS

Conventions of Standard English

Standard: Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing.

Each Read Naturally GATE lesson includes opportunities for writing sentences and for spelling untaught words phonetically, drawing on phonemic awareness and spelling conventions.

Vocabulary Acquisition and Use

Standard: Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases by using context clues, analyzing meaningful word parts, and consulting general and specialized reference materials, as appropriate.

Read Naturally GATE directly teaches key words for each nonfiction story and has vocabulary questions that reinforce meaning. Students progress from decoding regular one-syllable words to understanding how to decode compound words, two-syllable words with the CVC/CVC pattern, and words with inflected endings.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Read Naturally® GATE Small-group instruction to teach phonemic awareness, phonics, high-frequency words, and fluency  Learn more about Read Naturally GATE