Reading Service

The Child Mind Institute’s reading service offers reading remediation groups for first and second grade students struggling with early reading acquisition. These will take place twice weekly for 14 weeks. We will provide ongoing feedback to teachers and caregivers, including weekly emails about the work of the week, a meeting with a child’s teacher and caregiver every 6 weeks to discuss the child’s progress in greater detail, and suggested activities to practice skills in the classroom and at home. We will evaluate student progress, based on pre- and post-assessments to measure the child’s phonemic awareness, decoding fluency, word reading fluency, and oral reading fluency.

Schools are responsible for identifying students who may benefit from the program. The group is appropriate for first and second grade students who are reading below grade-level with specific difficulties in word-identification and decoding that are rooted in weak alphabetics. Some signs that a student may 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)

Expert clinicians from the Child Mind Institute’s Learning Disorders Center chose our reading remediation group model based on a thorough review of the most effective reading interventions in the field. We have chosen to use Sound Partners, which is 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) standards as having strong evidence for effectiveness, and What Works Clearinghouse considers Sound Partners to have strong outcome data in alphabetics, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. We are supplementing the Sound Partners model with phonemic awareness activities taken from the minute Drills from David Kilpatrick’s Equipped for Reading Success.

Each session will include activities that target the following:

• Phonemic awareness
• Letter-sound correspondence
• Phoneme blending
• Decoding and encoding phonetically regular words
• Reading and encoding irregular, high-frequency words
• Reading connected text aloud

Child Mind Institute’s reading service also provides staff training and ongoing consultation to our partner schools, with the goal of building schools’ capacity to support at-risk readers through the delivery of evidence-based intervention.

Partner schools should identify 4-6 staff members (i.e. teachers, paraprofessionals, literacy coaches) who will participate in training during the intervention cycle and have the ability to continue service delivery after the 14-week cycle concludes. Training includes observations of intervention sessions, participation in a 3-hour implementation training, and ongoing weekly consultation.

Please follow these steps to help streamline the process to bring our reading remediation 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, participating first and second grade teachers will 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 (45 minutes at a designated time each session).