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Kindergarten teacher Miriam Dixon was one of the first in South Carolina to complete training in LETRS. The Chester County School District has seen an improvement in third grade reading scores since teachers implemented the program.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Tap it out
Kindergarten students at Chester Park School of Inquiry “tap out” the sounds of letters using a technique from the LETRS literacy program.
Photo by Mic Smith
In Miriam Dixon’s kindergarten classroom at Chester Park School of Inquiry, the 14-year veteran teacher stands in front of seven students seated at their desks, and she asks them to sound out the word “nap.” The students, in sing-song unison, speak each of the three sounds clearly and emphatically: n-a-p
Dixon then asks the students to “tap it out.” For the first sound, the students tap their shoulders, for the second, they tap the crooks of their elbows and for the third sound, they tap the top of their hand. Next, the students hold up little mirrors and watch their mouths as they sound out the word for a third time. For the fourth sounding, they dump out letter tiles from zip-close bags, and each student attaches a yellow “n,” a red “a” and a green “p” to a magnetic board.
Every single student gets it right, and Dixon bursts into her usual refrains of encouragement—“Good job!” and “Pat yourself on the back!”—before asking who among them likes to take a nap. (Almost every hand shoots up.)
Although this may look, at first, like some sort of pantomime—a version of “Simon Says”—it’s really part of a new science-based approach to teaching literacy. Hundreds of South Carolina elementary schools have enrolled their Language Arts teachers into a two-year professional development program called LETRS, which stands for Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, and Dixon was part of that initial cohort.
About her lesson, Dixon explains, “If they feel the tap and are actually mapping the word, it’s more hands-on. They can visually see it, tap it out, and after that, they’re able to build it a little faster, to find the letters and put them in order. The goal is for them to see it, to hear it, tap it, and then build it on their own.”
LETRS, however, is not a curriculum. It’s an professional development program in which teachers learn more about established research into how students best acquire literacy. For instance, teachers may study MRI scans showing how the brain lights up when learning new vocabulary, or they may examine research about how students use playtime to practice new vocabulary. They can then implement this new knowledge into their existing lesson plans.
According to the education nonprofit The Reading League, LETRS, written by Dr. Louisa Moats and Dr. Carol Tolman, is based on the work of many reading scientists, including neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene. The research shows that reading begins in the part of the brain responsible for visual recognition. This makes sense—we first see the marks on the page—but neuroscientists now identify that the brain connects the visual stimuli to the phonology represented by the letters, and then to its “letterbox”—basically a storage unit of recognized letters and letter patterns. From there, information makes its way along neural pathways in the left hemisphere, and into another area that is responsible for meaning.
Dr. Alisha Green, director of literacy for the Chester County School District, who also went through the professional development program, is convinced that the LETRS instruction techniques are a better way to teach reading because they teach children decoding—breaking apart a word into sounds—along with reading comprehension—understanding what a word means. Thus, these two skills activate and strengthen both of the essential neural pathways that are required for early readers, and some researchers have likened this to two strands braiding together to form a strong rope.
“As a state, we have done an excellent job teaching reading comprehension strategies,” Green says. “What we were not doing well across the state, was teaching children how to decode text systematically and explicitly. Basically, you can’t comprehend what you can’t decode. As a district, we’re learning that this was the piece of instruction we’ve been missing.”
According to the S.C. Department of Education’s latest report, third grade reading scores in the Chester County School District have climbed since the introduction of LETRS. In the spring of 2021, 27.7% of students met or exceeded state language arts standards. In 2023, 44.3% met or exceeded the standard, Green says.
The program has also been enormously successful in Mississippi, and that success caught the attention of the S.C. Department of Education, says Laura Bayne, the state’s deputy superintendent of strategic engagement.
“I don’t think a lot of people know that only about 54% of South Carolina students test on grade level for reading,” Bayne says. “That is simply something we have to put all our energy into rectifying.”
She adds, “There’s an old adage that grades kindergarten through grade three ‘learn to read,’ and then grade four and on ‘read to learn.’ So, if you are not reading and not doing well in that area since the start of fourth grade, the likelihood is that you will struggle throughout the rest of your educational career, and may even fall into other struggles, like behavioral problems.”
Seeing results
At first, the initiative may have produced some eye rolling. But then people started to notice results.
Lora Tyler, the principal of Loris Elementary School, says, “I have witnessed greater reading excitement through teachers and students. I feel like the teachers have an increased level of confidence in teaching reading, and our students now want to read for you. If you come in the building, and you want to make our students happy, sit down and let them read to you. And I haven’t always seen that.”
Green tells the story of a teacher who has taught for more than two decades and who came to her in tears, saying, “I’m a good teacher, but I’ve realized there are things I didn’t do because I didn’t know to do them, but I’m doing them now and seeing growth like I’ve never seen before. And the only thing I’ve done differently is apply my new knowledge.”
Indeed, the rollout of the program has been such a success in places like Loris and Chester that the South Carolina State Legislature provided enough funding in the 2023–24 state budget to ensure that every kindergarten through third grade teacher can have LETRS training going forward.
It will be a gradual rollout, Bayne says, and what she calls “a coalition of the willing.” But if a school wants to get its teachers trained, and as long as there are enough trainers, the funds are available. And so far, more volunteers have come forward than the Department of Education anticipated.
After all, as Lora Tyler puts it, “Teachers go into this profession because they love students. They want to teach them the necessary skills to be successful their whole lives … and teaching a child to read is the biggest gift that we can give.”
Lightbulb moments
On the same day as Dixon’s students at Chester Park School of Inquiry are sounding out the word “can,” Haley Graham’s first grade students are working on the word “car.”
Although it may seem like a small difference—only one letter—the word “car” is really a vehicle, as it were, for learning a new sound pattern of “ar” and adding it to their brains’ “letterboxes.”
Graham, a first-year teacher who is halfway through the LETRS training, has the goal today of getting students to recognize the “ar” sound, then to use it in a variety of simple words—car, star, jar, far—before progressing to words like card, start, sharp, shark, and so on.
One student, trying to spell out “card,” puts a “b” on the end and comes up with the word for a sugar molecule rather than a piece of stock paper. But he double-checks his work and then makes the correct replacement. He looks up and beams when Ms. Graham dishes out another “Good job!”
It’s the kind of moment that reminds reading teachers like Graham and Dixon why they went into this profession in the first place, and why they believe in LETRS to help them keep going.
“I’ve always had a love for children, and I always knew I wanted to work with children one day,” says Graham. “Before LETRS, I didn’t have an understanding of why it’s so difficult for kids to start reading and how reading is connected to the brain. I feel like LETRS gives you more in-depth knowledge.”
“I live for that lightbulb effect,” Dixon says. “They come in with limited experience and become awesome readers at the end of the year.”
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Get more
For additional details on the LETRS program, the research behind it, and how the South Carolina Department of Education is rolling out the new training options, visit ed.sc.gov/literacy.