Beginning of the Project – children were divided into five groups related to the waves of training received by their literacy project teachers:  —

1)  Wave I: 35 children taught in a variety of school settings —

2)  Wave II: 40 children taught in a variety of school settings —

3)  Wave III: 26 children taught in a variety of school settings

—4)  A specialized small group (1:4) environment was constructed for 51 students (K-3rd) at GPA who participated in the pilot project to serve as a control group. —

5) 42 Control Group (CG) children who did not receive the study’s intervention program.

Total Children:  194 entered program

—

Each child, grades K-3, was benchmarked with a set of early literacy indicators to assess phonemic awareness and phonics.  These assessments include fluency measures that include beginning sounds, letter names, letter sounds, phoneme segmentation, and nonsense word reading, all foundational skills children must develop through instruction and practice to emerge as readers. —

Children in the Downing Literacy Project, Waves 1-3 and the two control groups, were assessed four times using the AIMSweb formative assessment and basic skills improvement system by their group instructor.   At the four scheduled dates, the students (1st – 3rd) were also assessed on the R-CBM (Reading Curriculum Benchmark Monitor) on grade level. The scores were entered on the teacher’s AIMSweb account.