In Raymond Elementary School’s pre-kindergarten classroom, boys and girls huddled together on a rug with their teacher to learn a foundational skill for reading and spelling: how to pull apart and put together letter sounds that make words.

“Zzz-oo,” the teacher sounded out to the children. “Ay-t. Sss-igh.”

“Zoo,” the kids responded in near unison. “Ate. Sigh.”

The students were working through a pilot program, Sounds of Success, authored by Kirsten Chansky, an instructional coach for Regional School Unit 14, the district for Raymond Elementary and home to more than 3,100 students across Windham and Raymond.

The new curriculum teaches young children how to break down words by their sounds and then put them back together, also known as phonemic awareness.

Before this program, Chansky and others in her district said they had no readily available curriculum that featured lesson plans, intervention techniques and assessments focused on phonemic awareness. Now they do.

Chansky decided to create Sounds of Success after noticing several years ago that some students were falling behind on the skills they needed to become successful readers, such as being able to identify letter sounds and recognize words. Teachers, parents and students were doing everything they could to try to build those skills, she said, reflecting on her own time as a first grade teacher, but something was missing.

“We need to be thinking about what’s best for every kid. If best practice is to be working at the phoneme level, that benefits every child.” Chansky said, referencing the distinct units of sounds in words.

The program has been used in multiple classrooms at RSU 14 for a year, and Chansky said that it is also being piloted in five other districts in Maine: Hiram-based RSU 55, Fryeburg-based SAD 72, Poland-based RSU 16, Gray-based SAD 15, and RSU 23 in Old Orchard Beach. 

Researchers have long considered understanding how sounds in words work to be a vital component of learning to read. The National Reading Panel named phonemic awareness one of five key components for building literacy in 2000.

But many curricula used in classrooms across the United States, including in Maine, emphasized approaches that were not rooted in evidence, and some popular reading programs did not prioritize phonemic awareness or phonics, a related alphabetical skill that researchers have found to be necessary for kids learning to read.

Chansky said Sounds of Success is rooted in decades of research, targets young students such as kindergartners and first graders, and is easy for teachers to implement since it only takes a small amount of class time and can be worked into other reading-related curriculums.

The program is now certified for the Every Student Succeeds Act — the federal law that guides academic standards and replaced the No Child Left Behind Act more than a decade ago — through Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Chansky will self-publish the curriculum for purchase online for $59 later this month.

Chansky said she started digging into literacy research seven years ago when she was a first grade teacher. She learned that many programs taught methods such as rhyming words and breaking down words by syllables, but they did not dive deep enough into breaking down each letter sound. 

So Chansky created exercises for her own classroom, taking inspiration from the studies she read, her teaching experience and some exercise frameworks she saw in other curriculums, she said. Her work expanded to help other classrooms, and she drafted a formal curriculum last year.

Being able to manipulate sounds in words can boost reading outcomes, according to the National Reading Panel, which was tasked by Congress to review and analyze research on reading in the late 1990s. The panel’s report, released in 2000, stated that knowing how to manipulate phonemes, or sounds in spoken language, helped children grasp reading, as this awareness taught them how words are structured.

The Maine Monitor spoke with eight educators, including a curriculum coordinator and principal in RSU 14, and one curriculum coordinator in Hiram-based RSU 55, where the program is also being piloted. All said the program was helping their students build valuable skills that will help with reading.

The curriculum’s approach lays a foundation for young learners, allowing teachers to instruct at higher levels later on, said Jessica Melcher, a literacy coach at RSU 14 who is also Chansky’s sister. Melcher is seeing a decrease in the number of children who require additional academic support, meaning fewer kids are missing out on classroom time just to catch up on skills they are struggling with.

Though staff have been trained in phonemic awareness and were aware of the research, there were no comprehensive instructional materials that focused on blending and segmenting sounds in a word that the school could buy, said Christine Hesler, the director of curriculum. 

Though the school year is not yet over, she said the district has already seen positive results from Chansky’s program.

“We just finished winter benchmarking. I’m watching these classrooms, and it’s absolutely off the charts,” Hesler said.

As part of an internal study with Johns Hopkins this school year, educators are tracking how their kindergarten students in three classes can break down letter sounds and identify letter sounds in nonsense words such as “pim” or “sut,” and put together nonsense words correctly.

Though students work with real words in the curriculum, Chansky said they use nonsense words in the assessments to prevent students from guessing or relying on memory to identify sounds in words they may already know.

Student results fall into four groups: those in need of extensive support and are at high risk for reading difficulty; those who need support and are at moderate risk for reading difficulty; those who are responding to the curriculum well and are meeting the benchmark; and those who are performing above the benchmark.

In the fall, all three kindergarten classes showed that many students needed support in building phoneme skills. Only a small fraction of students in each class could meet the beginning-of-the-year benchmark for all phonemic skills.

As the year goes on, the goals for what students should know expand as students learn more in class. In January, the students were tested again. This time, many students in each class exceeded the middle-of-the-year benchmark. Some students are already exceeding the end-of-the-year benchmark, according to the data reviewed by The Monitor.

Kimberly Weeks, a first grade teacher in RSU 14, said many of her students started the program last year in kindergarten. Students who had this education came in this year more confident with sounds in words and are ahead on their grade-level phonics curriculum, she said.

Normally, Weeks said her students start by focusing on sounds such as short “a” or short “i,” which can take a month or more to learn. But this year, she said, the students came in already knowing these skills. Students instead did a mini review of the topics and then tackled more complex phonics, such as working with vowels in words like “cake,” she said.

“We were able to start at a much higher level than what we’ve ever had to start off with in the past,” Weeks said.

How these skills will translate into students’ reading skills on standardized exams is not yet known. While each school assesses students throughout the year using their own methods, students take standardized tests starting in third grade for the state test and fourth grade for the national test.

Maine students’ reading scores on national standardized tests have declined in recent years, and Maine standardized testing from the last school year shows that about 39 percent of students in the third grade are not proficient in language arts. (Long-range, year-over-year comparisons of state standardized testing data is not possible due to the number of times the test has changed, according to the Maine Department of Education.)

Still, Chansky and others in her district are hopeful that the test results will show improvement.

“Kids shouldn’t need to win the lottery to know how to read,” Chansky said. “I feel very strongly that when we know better, we do better. And we know better now.”

This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit civic news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.