Reading Service

The Child Mind Institute’s reading service offers reading intervention groups for first and second grade students struggling with early reading acquisition. These will take place twice weekly for a total of 14 weeks. We will provide ongoing feedback to teachers and caregivers, including:

• Weekly recap emails
• A meeting between teacher and caregiver, midway through the program, to discuss the child’s progress in greater detail
• Suggested activities to reinforce skills in the classroom and at home

We will use pre- and post-assessments to evaluate student progress and measure the child’s phonological awareness, decoding, and word recognition skills.

Schools are responsible for identifying students who may benefit from the program. It is appropriate for first and second grade students reading below grade-level expectations. The program is also intended for English language learners and students receiving special education services. Some signs that a student could benefit from participating may be that the student:

• Consistently scores below grade-level expectation on assessments
• Struggles to sound out words and/or string sounds together
• Labors over a word despite having seen or read it several times before
• Guesses or makes up words when reading
• Avoids reading aloud (i.e., goes to the bathroom, goes to the nurse)

Designed by expert clinicians in the Learning Disorders Center at the Child Mind Institute, our reading intervention uses Sound Partners — a research-based, systematic, and explicit phonics-based program that targets word-level reading skills. This intervention is classified by Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) standard as having strong evidence for effectiveness. The intervention also includes activities to develop important phonological awareness skills, such as blending and rhyming.  Students receive decodable readers to practice applying letter-sound knowledge and build confidence. Targeted foundational reading skills are aligned with Acadience Reading indicators.

Additionally, we supplement our intervention with activities that promote a growth mindset. Children who experience reading difficulties can often lose confidence in themselves as learners. Teaching and practicing a growth mindset can help them to cope with frustration, reframe mistakes as learning opportunities, and understand that their reading skills will grow with effort and persistence.

Each session will include activities that target the following:

• Phonological awareness
• Letter-sound correspondence
• Phoneme blending and segmenting
• Decoding and encoding phonetically regular words
• Recognizing irregular, high-frequency words
• Accurate, fluent, and expressive reading of connected text

The Child Mind Institute’s reading service also works with partner schools to teach under-utilized school staff – such as paraprofessionals – how to deliver this powerful research-based reading intervention.  We provide training, consultation support, and access to curriculum materials and resources.

Partner schools should identify at least five staff members (i.e., paraprofessionals, classroom teachers, literacy coaches) who will participate in training workshops and can facilitate their own reading intervention groups. Trainees receive four hours of training with one of our Reading Specialists and opportunities for onsite and/or virtual consultation support to ensure a smooth program launch.

Please follow these steps to help streamline the process to bring our reading intervention program to your school:

1. Establish a consistent and responsive point of contact to coordinate the application process, scheduling, logistics, data collection, and caregiver communication.
2. Send an email to SchoolandCommunity@childmind.org to schedule a partnership meeting.
3. Once our team confirms partnership, have participating first and second grade teachers identify the lowest performing readers (bottom 25%) within their classrooms (teachers can use benchmarking tool of their choice), swiftly provide appropriate student referrals, and speak with legal guardians to obtain verbal consent.
4. Provide a consistent, confidential time and meeting space for twice weekly student groups, which will be 45 minutes long each session.