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Goal

The goal for Hand 2 Mind Phonics Mats is to utilize a multisensory approach to build phonics skills and improve early reading proficiency for our primary students.  

What will be done with my students

Before the school year begins, we will distribute the kits and host professional development during our grade level meeting. The professional development will include a gradual release training where use of the kits is modeled, guided, and practiced with all teachers, paras, and support facilitators that work with our students.

At the beginning of the school year, our first grade students will be reviewing letters names, sounds, and concepts of print that they learned in Kindergarten. We will use these mats to practice these skills and introduce how to use the mats during small group instruction so that they become familiar with the procedures that go into using them.

As we begin to introduce Nassau County's Saxon Phonics and Benchmark Advance curriculum, we will pair the phonics components with the Phonics Mats to bring phonics instruction to life. The students will utilize the boards to build, blend and segment words. They will use these boards to help them show their new phonics skills during whole group instruction, small group instruction, and after school tutoring to seamlessly integrate multisensory strategies with the curriculum that is provided.

Throughout the school year, teachers will continue to integrate the Hand 2 Mind phonics mats into the phonics and reading curriculum to build and enhance the decoding and encoding skills that make our students proficient readers.

As we we analyze the data and see success, we will train our Kindergarten and Second Grade teachers to use the kits as well so that other students in our school can benefit from there as well. Southside's success with these kits to build reading proficiency has to the potential to be shared with reading coaches district wide so that all teachers and students across the district might be able to obtain and use these as learning tools.

 

Benefits to my students

Never before have we had a resource with all the components and manipulatives required to concretely represent phonics skills and show how letters come together and create words.

These Hands 2 Minds kits will help us reach all learners, the multisensory nature of these boards will provide the necessary accommodations that are often required for all early learners to be successful. The kits will provide a tool that meets all learning styles of all students, including but not limited to visual learners, kinesthetic learning, tactile learners, and more. Research has shown that multisensory tools are particularly effective in reaching subgroups that struggle with reading proficiency, including our ESE and ELL students. The boards are interactive and multisensory. The tools will help to advance young learners by using hands-on literacy skills practice. Not only will these kits benefit our first grade students for next school year, they will benefit students in other grade levels and future students for years to come. The scope and sequence of our learning plan for these kits will most surely have a positive impact on reading proficiency at Southside and across the district. Literacy is the primary predictor for student success at higher levels, there is no better investment that time or money could buy for our students and we are so excited to use these kits to give them the support they need to be lifelong learners.  

Budget Narrative

The budget for this is $1,124.85. This will allow us to have enough boards for each classroom on our grade level to have a small group set of 7 boards along with some to share with support facilitators and paraprofessional that assist with interventions. 

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