Common Core State Standards

How Read Naturally Strategy Programs Address Common Core State Standards

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

FOUNDATIONAL SKILLS

Phonics and Word Recognition

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

All Read Naturally Strategy programs provide nonfiction stories and the support needed to develop phonics and word recognition in context, enabling students to:

Apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills to reading.
Learn unknown words and practice difficult words by reading along with a proficient reader who models correct pronunciation.
Recognize some words and master other words through repeated reading.
Become automatic with high-frequency words and/or other irregular words through repetition and application.
Transfer knowledge of the words learned and mastered to subsequent text.

The phonics series lessons teach phonics and word analysis skills using key words, nonfiction stories, and word lists. Students read along with a proficient reader 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.

Fluency

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

All Read Naturally Strategy programs develop reading fluency using challenging nonfiction stories. 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. The student is accountable to read with purpose and must demonstrate understanding by answering comprehension questions and retelling or summarizing the stories. Over time, the student reads more difficult stories until he or she is able to read on-level text independently.

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.

All Read Naturally Strategy programs include comprehension questions that require students to attend to key ideas and details in the text. Most series include main idea, detail, vocabulary, and inference questions; at the higher levels, additional processing questions require work in sequencing, summarizing, and drawing conclusions. However, the questions from some series reinforce the focus of the series; for example, questions in the phonics series 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.

All Read Naturally Strategy programs require students to be accountable for meaning by including comprehension questions and/or summarizing activities. Each story has questions about main idea or details. Students retell the story in the lower levels and summarize the story in the higher levels.

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas

Standard: Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.

In the higher levels of the Read Naturally Strategy programs, each story is paired with another story about a related topic. Each pair of stories has three comparison questions that students can answer using knowledge obtained from both stories. In addition, another set of comparison questions ties non-paired stories together. The comparison questions encourage analysis across different topics and provide opportunities to make deeper connections.

Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity

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

In the Read Naturally Strategy programs, each student works in a challenging level of nonfiction stories to become a proficient reader. Read Naturally stories are carefully grouped by level according to the Common Core State 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 challenging vocabulary is occasionally subject- or discipline-specific.

Lexile Measures of the programs by level are available for Read Naturally Live and Read Naturally Encore II.

LANGUAGE STANDARDS

Vocabulary Acquisition and Use

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

Each Read Naturally Strategy program includes opportunities for writing sentences using correct capitalization, punctuation, and spelling.

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.

Most Read Naturally Strategy programs directly teach key words for each nonfiction story, and all programs provide glossaries for learning the meanings of unfamiliar words. All programs also have a vocabulary question using context clues, and some programs have vocabulary questions that reinforce antonyms, synonyms, or short definitions.

Standard: Demonstrate understanding of figurative language, word relationships, and nuances in word meaning.

Read Naturally Live and Read Naturally Encore II each have a series that directly teaches common American idioms in the context of nonfiction stories. Students use glossaries and demonstrate their understanding by answering comprehension questions.