AwesomeStPaul is proud to announce our September 2024 grant recipient Growing Amazing Readers and Writers. Teacher Holly Johnston describes the project. “My students made amazing growth in reading and
writing using the power of the Science of Reading this past year. By using the UFLI Foundation's explicit and systematic phonics program developed by the University of Florida, I taught my students how to use letter sounds to learn to blend and segment words, and become fantastic readers and writers. I found that I am limited in my attempts to teach reading completely because I lack some of the most important resources for helping students apply what they have learned in the phonics program to practice reading at different levels using decodable books. I purchased some of the lowest level Bob Books off of the Amazon website using my own money to give my students practice reading. I would love to offer them even more challenging books as they become more fluent readers. I would love to purchase higher level Bob Books with this money in order to help them become even more proficient in reading. I use small groups to practice teaching reading using the Bob Books, and this is why I would need 6 books of each title (me and 5 students in a group). I have found that by growing in their reading, students were also growing in their writing ability. The sight word books would help them gain even more proficiency in writing as they learn more sight words to use in writing.”