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Which Academic Skills Are Most Important for School Success?

Originally published on the Macaroni KID website

As students progress through school, the academic demands increase rapidly. When children are young, they need to master early foundational skills, such as letter/sound recognition, counting, and basic arithmetic. As they get older, they are taught to read and comprehend short passages, then longer, more complex paragraphs and books. They must effectively write sentences, paragraphs, and essays, and complete increasingly difficult math computation and word problems. Which skills are most important for success in school?

Reading

Reading is one of the most critical skills for academic success. It affects essentially all aspects of school, including social studies, science, math, and other subjects. Students need to first develop their phonemic awareness skills – the precursor to reading – including rhyming, initial sound recognition, and blending sounds to form words, amongst other related skills. Next, they need to learn how to sound out words accurately, starting with basic consonant-vowel-consonant words and then building up to words with blends, consonant digraphs, vowel digraphs, silent e patterns, and so on. Orton Gillingham instruction can help students build these core reading skills. Starting around third grade, students typically start to see a shift from learning to read to reading to learn, where the emphasis on reading comprehension and fluency becomes more important. At this time, students should learn strategies to build these skills, such as identifying the main idea and salient details, visualizing information that they read, and making inferences – skills that become even more important as they progress through school. Reading tutoring, including focusing on decoding, fluency, ands comprehension, can help students excel with these skills.

Writing

Writing is another key skill for success in school. At a young age, students should learn how to write letters using the proper top-to-bottom formation. They should then learn how to spell basic two and three letter words, including words they can sound out (like “at”, “cup”, and “pin”) and sight words that they can’t sound out (like “who” and “the”). From there, students should learn how to write basic sentences, containing a subject and predicate, and then expand their sentences with adjectives and adverbs. When they are a bit older, students will learn how to write basic paragraphs, typically containing a topic sentence, three details, and a conclusion sentence, and later extended paragraphs, containing additional supporting details. Later in elementary school and into middle school, students will learn how to write well-constructed five paragraph essays, containing an introduction paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion paragraph, and then more complex essays and research papers. Writing tutoring can help students tremendously who struggle with these skills.

Math

When students are young, they should learn foundational math concepts, such as counting, greater/less than, and basic oral arithmetic. Math can be integrated into everyday life at this time; for example, if you are at the supermarket with your young child, take out two oranges and three grapefruits, and have them count the pieces of fruit you picked out and tell you the total. These activists will help them build early math foundations. Later, they will need to learn their math facts and how to solve increasingly complex math computation problems. Much of math instruction at schools now integrates a great deal of language, including word problem solving. Students should learn concrete strategies for breaking down math word problems, moving from language to arithmetic and back to language. Math tutoring can help students immensely who struggle with this skill.

Reading, writing, and math skills become increasingly important as students move through school. It is important that students develop strong early foundations in these skills and then learn to grasp increasingly complex skills. Individualized academic tutoring can help students improve these skills and ultimately achieve success in school.

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academic skillspractical strategiesstudent successwriting proficiency

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– Parent

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