Judith Johnson, a very experienced educator from Clearwater, FL led Reading Camp's Teacher Training this past Saturday at The Church of St. Michael the Archangel in Lexington. The workshop was a great success for Reading Camp volunteer teachers who had come to learn more about Decoding, Phonics, and Vocabulary. The Powerpoint presentation is available online below and also linked here.
Some major points of learning for many in attendance at Saturday's workshop included:
*Verbal stimulation (the number of words a young child hears at home) may be the most important predictor of the child’s academic success.
“It is beyond unrealistic to expect schools to fix children who enter school already behind.” – William Raspberry
*High-knowledge third graders had vocabularies about equal to lowest-performing 12th graders
*Dr. Edward Fry’s 1000 Instant Words – the most common words ranked in frequency order.
- First 25 Instant Words make up about 1/3 of all reading material.
the, of, and, a, to, in, is, you, that, it, he, was, for, on, are, as, with, his, they, I, at, be, this, have, from
- First 100 Instant Words make up about ½ of text on a given page.
- First 300 Instant Words make up 2/3 of all printed text.
