"Reading is the single most important factor in America today . . . The more you read, the more you know. The more you know, the smarter you grow. The smarter you are, the longer you stay in school and the more diplomas you earn. The more diplomas you have, the more days you are employed. The more diplomas you have, the more your children will achieve in school. And the more diplomas you have, the longer you will live."
—Jim Trelease, nationally known reading expert

Western Oaks Elementary School teacher Halcy Hall is pushing a cart down a hallway. The cart is overflowing with books, crayons, markers, plastic letters, paper, stickers, games and other colorful educational materials. Hall is not a classroom teacher. Instead, she brings her cart full of materials to 10 classrooms each day with just one goal in mind: helping young students learn to read.

In Ms. Sparkman’s 2nd-grade class, Hall sits down at a table with three students who are having trouble with consonant blends – combinations of two or three consonants in which each consonant sound is heard, such as the "sl" in sleep or the "fl" in flat.

"Let’s play a little game," Hall says to the students. Within seconds, students are identifying objects in pictures, saying the word aloud and then pronouncing just the blended sound.

"Snow. Sn!"

"Black. Bl!"

"Spot. Sp!"

A new activity starts – a blend bingo game. Students hear words such as sled, spill and smoke, and put a marker over the correct blend on their bingo card. After one student gets a bingo, all three students get the chance to tell what blends they have on their bingo cards.

A few minutes later, in Ms. Munson’s 2nd-grade class, Hall sits down to work with students on consonant diagraphs – pairs of letters that operate together to represent a single sound, such as the "ch" in chin or the "th" in thing. Hall holds up pictures for students to identify, and students both say the diagraph aloud and pinch the correct diagraph on a card full of diagraphs. Other activities follow. At the end of the lesson, Hall tells students to pat themselves on the back.

"I heard excellent strategies for reading today. Devon, you did something very smart – you fixed a mistake. Kelsey, you are so good! When you get stuck, you go back. Keisha, you are really getting better at seeing diagraphs!" Hall says.

Specific Students Get Specific Help
The students Hall works with and the skills on which they work are purposely chosen. Classroom teachers work with their students on reading, assess how they’re doing and enter their strengths and weaknesses in a database. Hall checks the database to find out which students need help with a certain skill, then pulls together small groups of students to work on it.

The groups meet for 20 to 30 minutes each day. Students come to the group daily until they have mastered the skill. Sometimes additional students are pulled into a group, and new and different ways of working on the skill are used. What doesn’t change is the focus on identifying specific skill deficiencies in specific students, and working with those students to correct them.

Why such close attention to reading? For educators, parents and the community at large, it’s hard to imagine a more important part of early schooling than teaching a child to read. Students who read well have a world of knowledge and life opportunities open to them. Students who do not read well are more likely to struggle in school and beyond. Helping students with reading isn’t just helping them learn another subject in school. It’s helping them be successful in life.

Some students are natural readers, Hall says, children who have "cracked the code." Other students don’t have all the pieces of the reading puzzle or haven’t figured out how to put them together. They may have problems with blends, diagraphs, fluency, phonemic awareness, comprehension or other aspects of reading.

There are many students who need extra help at some point during the school year. Hall estimates she and colleague Laura Bracklein work with 50 to 60 percent of the 600-plus students in the school by year’s end.

Special Expertise
Hall’s official title is "Title I Teacher." Title 1 is a federal program that provides extra funding to schools with high percentages of students living in poverty. Putnam City has nine elementary schools and three middle schools that receive Title I funds, and a total of 27 teachers at those schools who provide special help to students with reading or math.

Hall has 27 years of teaching experience and training in six different reading programs, giving her a wide array of strategies and techniques to help students with reading. The expertise and credentials of other such Title I teachers is similar. Some have earned or are in the process of earning national board certification, many have advanced degrees, and all are experienced teachers with extra training, solid knowledge and practical skills in teaching reading.

Why is experience and training so important for the role? Teaching children to read isn’t rocket science, is it? The answer is no, it’s not. It’s harder.

After all, rocket scientists know the amount of fuel it will take to drive a rocket fast enough and far enough to reach orbit. They know exactly how the materials the rocket is made of will react to changes in temperature and pressure. The answers to these problems are simply a matter of calculations. Steel does what steel does. Rocket fuel does what rocket fuel does. Both are concretely understandable and predictable.

That’s not the case in teaching reading. Children come to school with different backgrounds, knowledge and abilities. What works for one student may not work for another. What works for one student one day may not work another day. A technique that is effective in teaching one skill may not be helpful at all in teaching another. Students who learn best visually need one thing, while students who are auditory learners need something else.

That’s why classroom teachers and reading specialists both must be equipped with a wide range of strategies to meet the needs of students. Research continues to identify methods that are often helpful in teaching reading, but there is no technique or program that works for every student. Teaching reading is part science, part art, part intuition.

"So many students learn best by manipulating something, doing some kind of hands-on activity. But visual learners or auditory learners may not need that. What’s important is that all the students we work with get extra opportunities to learn skills in different ways and in ways that work best for them. They get more time to develop skills and gain confidence," Hall says.

A Program that Works
In the black-print-on-white-paper world of reading, the success of Title I reading and math specialists shows up in gray. Hall and Bracklein keep a database that when printed out shows a list of students they’ve worked with and the 20-plus skills each student must master to be a proficient reader. Once a student has mastered a skill – and left the group – the box that corresponds with the student and the skill is shaded gray. The more gray boxes a student has, the more skills he or she has mastered. Just a glance at the printout already shows a sea of gray, with a few white patches indicating skills on which some students still need help. Hall and Bracklein say by the end of the year, 75 to 80 percent of students they worked with will have mastered all of the reading skills on the list.

For Hall, seeing student success makes her job exciting and rewarding.

"I have the best job I can imagine. I work in a building filled with gifted, loving teachers. I learn new things every day. Best of all, I get to build relationships with students that help them succeed. When that happens, I have the ultimate thrill: I see students see themselves as readers, and I know their lives are full of new possibilities," Hall says.