Second-grade teacher Morgan O'Dell holds her fingers to her throat to show her students how to feel whether they are using their vocal cords at Thomas Miller Elementary School in Lafayette on Tuesday, Dec.
On a recent Tuesday morning, Morgan O'Dell showed her second-grade class a new skill: how to tell if the sounds that letters and words make are voiced or unvoiced. With their hands on their throats, 17 kids said their names slowly, stretching out the syllables.
But this year, their focus is on learning the sounds letters make and how to decode words. The change in Lafayette was spurred by state policy. The Indiana legislature passed a bipartisan law that requires districts to use reading curriculums that follow the science of reading beginning next school year.
The mandate was in response to an ongoing decline in literacy among young students across the state. Nearly 1 in 5 students were not mastering reading fundamentals like comprehension and phonics. Business and philanthropic leaders also pushed lawmakers to take action by providing tens of millions in funds. Purdue University professor Catherine McBride is a psychologist who studies reading and disabilities like dyslexia. She said that research shows that understanding how to pronounce words helps children learn to read and write.
People need several skills to comprehend text, McBride said. People need to know vocabulary and understand sentence structure. They also need the background knowledge to make sense of what they read. It inspired policy changes, including in Indiana. A new law, HEA , requires Indiana schools to use literacy curriculums that follow the science of reading beginning next school year. It also prohibits educators from using three-cueing, a popular approach that encourages children to guess words based on clues like context and pictures.
