Read how the Read Naturally strategy matches up to national standards in the white paper, Read Naturally, Scientific Research, and Reading First.
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The Essential Components of Reading

Read Naturally’s programs develop and support the five essential components of reading identified by the National Reading Panel:

Phonemic Awareness	Phonemes, the smallest units making up spoken language, combine to form syllables and words. Phonemic awareness refers to the student’s ability to focus on and manipulate these phonemes in spoken words. According to the National Reading Panel, teaching phonemic awareness to children significantly improves their reading ability.
Phonics	Phonics is the relationship between letters or word families, short vowels, long vowels, and letter combinations and the sounds they represent. As determined by National Reading Panel, phonics instruction helps early elementary students develop proficiency in decoding, spelling, and understanding words.
Fluency	Fluency is the ability to read as well as we speak and to make sense of the text without having to stop and decode each word. The National Reading Panel’s research findings concluded that guided, repeated oral reading significantly improves word recognition, reading fluency, and comprehension in students of all ages.
Vocabulary	Vocabulary development is closely connected to comprehension. According to the National Reading Panel, students need to hear, read, understand, and use new vocabulary words in various contexts to build their comprehension levels. Repetition, aided by quizzes, glossaries, and crossword puzzles, is paramount to building vocabulary.
Comprehension	Comprehension is the level of content understanding a student has after reading a passage. The National Reading Panel determined that young readers develop text comprehension through a variety of techniques, including answering questions (quizzes) and summarization (retelling the story).

The following table shows which Read Naturally programs support each of the reading components. The yellow cells indicate the reading components that each Read Naturally program focuses on. The light blue cells indicate other reading components that each Read Naturally program supports.

Product	Grade	Inter- vention Range	Phonemic Awareness	Phonics	Fluency	Vocab- ulary	Compre- hension
Word Warm-ups	1-3	1-8	X	X	X
Read Naturally GATE	1	1-2	X	X	X	X	X
Read Naturally ME	1-8	1-Adult		P	S, P, I, A, M	S, P, I, A, M	S, P, I, A, M
Read Naturally SE	1-8	1-Adult		P	S, P, I, A	S, P, I, A	S, P, I, A
One Minute Reader	E-5	Beginning Readers to Adult			X	X	X
Take Aim! at Vocabulary	4-5	4-Adult			X	X	X
Key: X = Program focuses on this reading component (yellow background, bold) or supports this reading component (light blue background, not bold) S = Sequenced Series P = Phonics Series I = Idioms Series A = American Manners & Customs Series M = Multicultural Series

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The Essential Components of Reading