Meet Anna!

Anna has been a part of our Literacy Program for about 6 months. She is 5 years old and completely awesome. I love being her tutor. She works so hard every session and we have such a good time! We have been working with various books and flashcards and last week I made some winter/Christmas flashcards to work with. She and her mom graciously agreed to let me take some video to share with you all. 🙂

At the beginning of the program, she would find the correct word to match to the flashcard out of a field of two. Now, she picks out of a field of 4 or 5! Her mom Jill tells me that she spreads all her words out on the floor at home and plays the matching game by herself, picking out the words out of a big pile! I’m so excited that she likes the materials we make so much so that she chooses to work with them at home.

The last unit we worked on was a Barney unit I made which included a book with her name in it. We played bingo-style games with the cards, did lots of matching and made up a few games as we went along to keep things fresh and fun. She’s always up for a new game. 🙂

She reads her name and a few words from the Barney unit all by herself now! For our Christmas unit, we’ve been using sign language to help remember some of the words, which she has picked up really quickly.

The thing I really love about the Literacy Program is how it is how it is designed to really help kids succeed in every step. The kids aren’t tested to find out what they don’t know but rather to show them what they do know which is, as you can imagine, really exciting (probably as much for me as it is the kids!) The matching games we play are so fun and there’s no pressure to get it all right, all the time. Eventually I start to notice Anna picking up words with no pictures attached and reading them to me as we play our games… what a wonderful way to learn and discover! I have so enjoyed getting to know Anna as we’ve worked together and I look forward to every week. I feel really privileged to be a small part in her journey towards literacy. Each bit of progress is so thrilling… I can’t tell who’s having more fun here, me or her! 🙂

Big thanks to Anna for being such a hardworking, amazing student and thanks to her awesome mom Jill who makes the trip out to the playhouse every week to bring Anna to the Literacy program and of course, thanks to Mary who comes along to our sessions and always has a “Good job, Anna!” ready for her big sister. 🙂

Hopefully we’ll have some more pictures and videos of our students to share with you soon! We are so excited about the progress we’ve seen in the Literacy Program and we’d love to introduce you to our other awesome students and tutors involved. Stay tuned! 🙂