Six-year-old Sunny LaCavera, a student in Cynthia Grant's first-grade class at Chase Street Elementary School, works on a phonics lesson Tuesday.
Ssss-at. Mmmm-at. Hhhh-at.
Sat. Mat. Hat.
It's not Sesame Street - it's any one of the kindergarten, first- or second-grade classrooms in the Clarke County School District, where students started following a single, set phonics curriculum as part of reading instruction this year.
Phonics teaches elementary reading skills by breaking down words into the sounds made by letters and letter combinations - a technique traditionally used on shows for children such as ''Sesame Street.''
The program is not the first time phonics has shown up in Clarke County classrooms - many teachers already integrated some phonics work into their reading lessons before this program was put in place, said Alta Allen, the district's executive director of curriculum.
''Up until now, the district had hoped all of the phonics components were embedded in lesson plans,'' she said.
All of the district's kindergarten, first- and second-grade teachers were trained in the program during planning days before classes started in August, and the system has been integrated into lessons since this school year began.
Cynthia Grant, center, helps student Floribel Delgado with a phonics lesson.
On a recent morning, Cynthia Grant's first-grade class at Chase Street Elementary School listened to the ''sss, sss'' sounds on a tape as a narrator told the story of Sue and Sammy and their supper sausages sizzling in a pan. They also sang a vowel song - ''A, E, I, O, U/I can say my vowels for you'' - complete with hand-clapping and snapping, and Grant took them through an exercise changing the first letter of words to test how the sounds changed.
The program includes cassette tapes, which Grant finds helpful because of the standardized pronunciation - there are different dialects and accents in the classroom that make some words, like ''pen'' and ''pin,'' sound similar.
''They all know their consonants,'' she said. ''But they don't really know their vowel sounds, because there are 19 different sounds from seven letters.''
Phonics lessons are an effective teaching tool because students learn how to ''decode'' words by recognizing which letters of the alphabet represent certain sounds, Allen said.
''It teaches them that all this print - environmental text, the text in books, the text on a computer screen - it all works the same way,'' she said.
The new program is supposed to guarantee consistency across the district - something that administrators hope will help the many students who move from one school to another in a district with a high mobility rate. With different programs, students can spend more time trying to catch up or figure out what's going on than they do learning, meanwhile falling farther behind when they move to a different school.
A curriculum audit last year by professional educators' organization Phi Kappa Delta pointed to the number of different reading programs in the district as a potential problem.
''I am just elated that we are beginning to think like a district and not individual schools,'' Superintendent Lewis Holloway said. ''It's important with a 40 percent mobility rate to have students stay on the same program so that they're not going into a school where the lessons are foreign to them.''
Published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Wednesday, September 3, 2003.
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