Sound Partners: One-to-One Phonics-Based Tutoring for Beginning Readers

Sound Partners is a one-to-one tutoring program designed to improve reading skills in kindergarten and first-grade students in urban schools. The program targets alphabetics, fluency, comprehension, and general reading achievement. It consists of 30-minute sessions, four days a week, throughout one school year. Each session includes four to eight short activities that change over the course of the intervention, emphasizing letter-sound correspondences, phoneme blending, decoding, and encoding phonetically regular words, as well as reading irregular high-frequency words. The program also includes oral reading practice in designated texts, with tutors trained to choose a reading method that matches each student's reading skills.