"Smile While You Read"

Blog post written by Colton Moore, Iowa Reading Corps AmeriCorps Member at Cardinal Elementary.

Colton Moore, Iowa Reading Corps
AmeriCorps Member

At the beginning of the year, I began working with a first grade student who still had not mastered letter sounds. This placed her farther behind the rest of her first graders peers I was tutoring through Reading Corps. However, after just a few weeks in Reading Corps, she had mastered her letter sounds and my coaches and I decided to move her on to word blending. For several weeks, I attempted to help her master the concept of putting sounds together to make words. Success still eluded us. We tried putting words together using cubes from another tutoring intervention, giving her words with only stop sounds or only continuous letter sounds and many other strategies to help her blend words, but all to no avail. 

After my internal coach made the suggestion to present the student with paper slips with only one word written on them at a time, I asked my internal coach to observe one of our tutoring sessions. Then, like she had the skill mastered the whole time, the first grader began reading the entire words to me, without even needing to first sound out the letters in the word. Whether it was shyness, an overwhelming amount of new content that needed time to be fully processed or my internal coach is some kind of magician, I am still unsure. Now the first grader is caught up with the rest of her peers and is well on her way to exiting the Reading Corps tutoring program.