Reading

Simply put, Harlem Academy students read a lot of books. We provide students with a literature-rich environment and offer opportunities to learn, practice, and even teach reading skills and strategies. Through our reading program, we seek to build confidence, independence, and a foundation for long-term academic success. Lower school students spend two and a half hours reading each day in addition to at least 20 minutes each night with a family member.

The reading curriculum incorporates a number of strategies to promote student learning:

• Read alouds. During read alouds, teachers read to students and model reading strategies, such as creating mental images and monitoring for comprehension. By the end of grade four, teachers model strategies such as text-to-self and text-to-world connections to promote understanding. Trophies Literacy, a basal reading program, helps students develop comprehension and fluency in reading from a variety of genres. Students have several days to try out a strategy during whole-class reading.
• Independent reading. Independent reading is a 30-45 minute block of time each day during which students choose books according to reading level and practice their reading strategies independently. By the end of grade four, a student is expected to choose books based on peer recommendations, topic, genre, favorite author, and/or book description. Students also have strategies for returning books that do not match their interest or reading level.
• Phonics. Phonics begins in grade one with the study of rhyming words, onsets, rimes, beginning sounds, and short vowel sounds. In grade two, students review short vowel sounds and explore long vowel sounds, blends, and digraphs. Root words, prefixes, and suffixes comprise informal phonics instruction in third and fourth grade. At each grade level, students practice phoneme segmentation, decoding, and encoding.
• Vocabulary. The Elements of Reading curriculum guides vocabulary lessons in grades one and two, and the Wordly Wise program steers instruction in grades three and four. Students are encouraged to use new words in both spoken and written expression and use context clues to figure out the meaning of unknown words or alternative meanings. Younger children are also exposed to vocabulary through real-life experiences of reading signs, posters, and advertisements. Older children discover new vocabulary words in their independent reading.

The lower school curriculum offers a cohesive progression that balances instruction in concrete reading skills and higher order thinking strategies.

• Grade One
• Grade Two
• Grade Three
• Grade Four