Concepts About Print

Students come to school with varying knowledge about literature and text features. Some students have had extensive exposure to a variety of texts while other students have had little. By assessing students' knowledge of text features and literacy the teacher can determine what students can already do well, what they need extra support in, and what they may be completely unfamiliar with.

DIBELS
This series of tests known as the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy is designed to help identify and monitor a child's growing literacy skills. It is comprised of five subtests: initial sounds fluency, nonsense words fluency, letter naming fluency, phoneme segmentation fluency, and oral reading fluency. The subtests are administered at different points in the child's literacy development. You can find more information about DIBELS at www.dibels.uoregon.edu

Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement
This standardized assessement tool can be used to determine the range of skills and concepts that a child has acquired from early reading and writing experiences. This contains six subtests: letter identification, concepts about print, hearing and recording sounds in words, word reading, writing vocabulary, and text reading. This assessment tool is especially useful as it can be used from grade Kindergarten on to monitor student growth. It is also useful for fifth grade because the teacher can pick and choose which subtests to give based on student need.

Text Features Checklist
Teachers can also create an informal, simple checklist to use in the classroom to assess students' ability to utilize and identify text features. To create a checklist look around your classroom and identify what types of text features are important to student learning. Then create your checklist based on that information. As students master a particular area you can check it off.

Classroom Practices to Support Print Concepts
Post the daily schedule around the classroom for students to see and use. Use charts and lists in your daily teaching, and when you come across charts, diagrams, or lists in a text make sure you discuss them. Fill your classroom library with a variety of print materials. Organize books in a way that students can easily find books of different genres and text types.