Two Essential Ingredients: Phonics and Fluency Getting to Know Each Other

An Annotation by Andrea Wondra

The article states that in 2000, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NICHD] found that phonics and fluency are two main ingredients in the teaching of reading and in children’s reading development.   Phonics and fluency should not be taught as separate units, but rather as natural, authentic, synergistic, effective, and engaging structural elements with rhyming poetry as the special ingredient.

This article is relevant to my research because it explains how rhyming poetry is the special ingredient to teaching common spelling patterns with consistent pronunciations for beginning readers.  It is the beginning of understanding word families or phonograms.

This is a high quality resource because it is from The Reading Teacher, a resource for teachers of children up to age 12.  The International Reading Association publishes these peer reviewed pieces.

Rasinski, T., Rupley, W. H., & Dee Nichols, W. (2008). Two Essential Ingredients: Phonics and Fluency Getting to Know Each Other. Reading Teacher, 62(3), 257-260.