Phonics Returns To Summer Classroom

Inside a summer classroom, Ayanna Perez wrote the letters D‑O-T on a white board for King and Legacy to slowly sound out, rather than try to guess or memorize the word. 

That scene took place Monday at Fair Haven School on Grand Avenue where Leadership, Education And Athletics In Partnership (LEAP) is hosting its summer programming for New Haven students. 

Monday’s hour-long phonics lesson at the LEAP site is a collaboration with the city for its New Haven Tutoring Initiative. Amid a national move to ditch ​“cue-ing” for old-school sounding out words in reading instruction, the nonprofit has reintroduced the twice-a-week phonics based lessons for for this year’s edition of its six-week summer program. 

The tutoring initiative is a city-led effort to address a reading crisis for elementary youth that grew more severe during the pandemic. The public school district saw slight growth in student reading skills since last year’s end-of-year assessment records, which indicated that just 23 percent of New Haven students were reading on grade level. 

As LEAP Director of Curriculum and Training, Summer Choate oversaw Monday’s lesson at Fair Haven School. She said the phonics programming is helping students catch up in the foundational reading skill of sounding out and decoding words rather than guessing.

A room of 15 kids worked in small groups with seven LEAP counselors who guided them through phonics-based activities for their fourth week in a row. 

Students took an initial assessment in June at the start of the summer program. They will work two days a week over the next six weeks on improving their reading skills. 

Counselors worked with small groups made up on students at similar skill levels. 

As counselors called out letters like N, F, and D, the students responded with the respective sounds. 

Other groups worked on learning short vowels, blends of four and five-letter words, sounding out words with more syllables, and prefixes and suffixes. 

At another table, counselor Jannine read out the five words rust, cups, plum, dust, and fund to the students to spell out on their own white boards. 

At a table with four second and third-grade students, Perez wrote three-letter words like top, hit, and hid on a white board. She then faced the word to the students and asked them not just to read the word but to read it ​“one sound at a time.”

Each student took a turn sounding the words and learning the different sounds of each letter. 

After writing out the word ​“bid,” one student guessed it read ​“did” instead. 

Rather than just telling the student they were wrong, Perez asked them to try again. ​“What are these letters?” she asked.

The students called out in unison the letters B‑I-D.

“What sound does B make?” she asked next.

Seven-year-old King put his lips together and released them to let out the sound of the letter B.

After completing several activities with her small group. Perez let students play a word game for the final 10 minutes of the hour block. 

Legacy and King played a round of Chutes and Ladders by each rolling dice, then moving a piece to the space on the board. The space contained a word they would have to sound out aloud before the next person took their turn. 

Counselors, who are typically high school and college-aged students, received two days of phonics training before this year’s program kicked off. 

In addition to the small group work Monday, another group of 15 students worked in another room on digital phonics lessons offered by Lexia Learning.

First-year LEAP counselor and Albertus Magnus College sophomore Perez has watched as the students she works with have improved over the past four weeks. She has noticed her students, many whom she described as shy or preferring independent work over group work, gain more confidence over the weeks. 

“When you don’t get mad at them and work the problem out with them, they know you’re just trying to help so they try harder,” she said. ​“It’s all about letting them know they got it.”