Your child learns reading through direct instruction and modelling of good reading habits. He must learn to decode words and apply prior knowledge of subjects to construct meaning. The skills needed to do this are fluency, phonemic awareness and comprehension. Fluency is the ability to identify words automatically, while phonemic awareness refers to knowing the letter sounds and their groupings to decode the words. Comprehension is the reader's understanding of what the words mean and what is happening in the story. Comprehension is the most analytical of these three reading skills. Your child can practice comprehension by making predictions and drawing conclusions about character motivation and author's purpose. Teachers measure fluency, phonemic awareness and comprehension to determine reading levels.
Teachers in many public schools use the University of Oregon's Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) as a measure of emergent and established reading ability. The test requires a student to read a prescribed passage aloud to the trained proctor who then scores that performance based on accuracy and retell (comprehension through paraphrasing). It also includes assessments of vocabulary, word usage and phonemic awareness. Teachers use these measures to identify students whose reading skills are well below grade level in order to provide supplemental services and progress monitoring.
Using the DIBELS scale, a child who accurately reads forty words in three minutes is assessed as "low risk" at the end of first grade, while the same child will need to accurately read ninety words of the second grade passage in the oral fluency test to be judged proficient for grade level. The comprehension goal is a 25% retell, meaning that the student can summarize what happened in the story using at least 25% of the number of words he read accurately, so a first grader who scored forty words would need a ten-word retell to achieve mastery. Third graders have a year-end benchmark of 110 words, while fourth graders only have an eight word increase to 118 for their final goal.
You and your child can meet the goals set forth by your school's assessment measures with several strategies at home. Read with your child and talk about what you read. Discuss the pictures, how the characters might feel and what other stories it reminds you of. Pick out unfamiliar words and discuss what they mean to build vocabulary and find books you both like at the library or bookstore to make reading more fun for your child. Be sure to choose books from multiple genres to keep her interest. She may not like fairy tales but science books about dinosaurs or comic books about superheroes may turn her head. Utilize the Accelerated Reader or Lexile level to make sure your books aren't at a frustratingly hard level for your child's ability.