In Raymond Elementary School’s pre-kindergarten classrooms, students sit together on a rug as their teacher models how to take apart and rebuild words using letter sounds. The teacher sounded out a sequence such as “Zzz-oo” and children responded in near unison, forming the word “Zoo,” in a lesson part of a new pilot curriculum designed around phonemic awareness.
Kirsten Chansky, an instructional coach for Regional School Unit 14, authored the Sounds of Success program after concluding that the district did not have comprehensive classroom materials that focused on the foundational reading skill. She said several years earlier she noticed some students were falling behind on what they needed to become successful readers—such as identifying letter sounds and recognizing words—and that teachers, parents and students were trying to fill gaps without a curriculum that gave them a clear, structured path.
Chansky described phonemic awareness as working with the distinct units of sounds in words, and she said the approach is grounded in decades of research. She pointed to the National Reading Panel’s 2000 report, which named phonemic awareness one of five key components for building literacy and said the ability to manipulate phonemes helps children grasp how words are structured.
In RSU 14, educators began using the program in multiple classrooms for a year. Chansky said it is also being piloted beyond Raymond, including in five other Maine districts: Hiram-based RSU 55, Fryeburg-based SAD 72, Poland-based RSU 16, Gray-based SAD 15 and RSU 23 in Old Orchard Beach. She said the curriculum is aimed at young students such as kindergartners and first graders, and she said it can be implemented with relatively small amounts of class time and woven into other reading-related curricula.
The program’s focus on blending and segmenting letter sounds also shaped how districts trained staff and measured student progress. Jessica Melcher, a literacy coach at RSU 14 and Chansky’s sister, said she had been seeing fewer students needing additional academic support. Christine Hesler, RSU 14’s director of curriculum, said staff training covered phonemic awareness but that the district lacked comprehensive instructional materials it could buy that targeted blending and segmenting sounds.
As part of an internal study with Johns Hopkins University during the school year, educators tracked kindergarten students in three classrooms on skills including breaking down letter sounds and identifying letter sounds in nonsense words such as “pim” or “sut,” and then putting together nonsense words correctly. Hesler said teachers used nonsense-word assessments so students would not guess or rely on memory from words they already knew.
Chansky said the district’s student results fell into four groups, including students who were in need of extensive support and at high risk for reading difficulty, those who needed support and were at moderate risk, those responding to the curriculum well and meeting benchmarks, and those performing above the benchmarks. In the fall, she said many students needed support in building phoneme skills, with only a small fraction able to meet the beginning-of-year benchmark for all phonemic skills; by January, she said many students exceeded the middle-of-the-year benchmark, and some were already exceeding the end-of-the-year benchmark based on the data reviewed by The Maine Monitor.
Kimberly Weeks, a first grade teacher in RSU 14, said many of her students had started the program in kindergarten, and that the students came into first grade more confident with sounds in words and ahead in their grade-level phonics curriculum. She said that normally students start with short “a” or short “i,” which can take a month or more, but that this year they did a mini review and moved to more complex phonics, including vowels in words like “cake.”
Hesler said district results were already showing improvement as the school year progressed, and she described performance as “off the charts” after winter benchmarking. Chansky said the program is now certified for the Every Student Succeeds Act through Johns Hopkins University, and she planned to self-publish the curriculum for purchase online for $59 later this month. She said standardized test outcomes are still unknown, with Maine standardized testing starting in third grade for the state test and fourth grade for the national test, and she said Maine’s language arts proficiency is low: about 39% of third graders were not proficient in the last school year. “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.”