Sound Partners

Sound Partners is a phonics-based tutoring program that provides supplemental reading instruction to elementary school students in grades K-3 with below average reading skills. The program is designed specifically for use by tutors with minimal training and experience. Instruction emphasizes letter-sound correspondences, phoneme blending, decoding and encoding phonetically regular words, and reading irregular high-frequency words, with oral reading to practice applying phonics skills in text. The program is delivered through one-to-one tutoring in 30-minute sessions, four days per week throughout one school year. Each tutoring session includes four to eight short activities, with the last 15 minutes allocated for oral reading practice using Bob Books® beginning reading series and other primary-level trade books. Tutors can be paraeducators or other adults who are trained to choose reading methods (independent reading, partner reading, or echo reading) that match each student's reading skills. The tutoring can be provided as a pull-out or after-school program.