In a conference room at the St. Louis County Library’s Samuel C. Sachs Branch in Chesterfield, parents and caregivers are learning how to teach their children to read.
The children are gathered around tables with colorful tiles with individual letters, which they then arrange to spell words.
At one table, kindergartner Bhuvan is flanked by his parents, Vennela Lingam and Sreevhar Aala, and his big sister, Bhoomi.
He arranged the tiles to spell out the word "wet."
“W - E - T. Wet!” Bhuvan said as he practiced writing the word.
Lingam said that Bhuvan had just started lessons focused on phonics at Shenandoah Valley Elementary in the Parkway School District.
“He started doing phonics, and he has a little [bit of] confusion [with] some letters like ‘J’ and ‘G’ [because] they sound the same sometimes,” Lingam said. “So we thought a class or a workshop like this might help.”
The workshop is called Gateway to Reading, and it’s a new program at the library that is grounded in a body of research called the “Science of Reading.”
The research focuses on how children learn to read through phonics, vocabulary, phonemic awareness, comprehension and fluency.
The workshops start with a brief presentation that explains what the Science of Reading is and common terms parents may have seen in guidance sent home from schools.
Laura Polak, the early literacy coordinator for SLCL, said the goal for the workshops is to make reading more approachable for families and to complement the work being done at schools.
“So we know that reading is a crisis in the region. We know that test scores for children are not where we would hope that they would be, and as the library, literacy is one of our central focuses, so it really made sense for us to think deeply about what we could do to support what's happening in our schools,” Polak said.
The crisis Polak is referring to is a decadelong decline in reading performance among students across the country.
In Missouri, 27% of fourth grade students and 26% of eighth grade students scored proficient and above, which means they have mastered essential reading skills. That’s down from more than 33% in 2019, according to the National Assessment of Education Progress.
To address decreased literacy in the state, Missouri passed a law in 2022 requiring schools to restructure their reading programs to be more aligned with Science of Reading principles.
The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has poured millions of dollars into evidence-based literacy instruction, including LETRs training, a program that prepares educators to teach reading methods grounded in the Science of Reading.
More than 90% of Missouri districts and charter schools have begun using these methods to teach reading.
Polak said that the workshops help demystify some of the complicated terms commonly used by teachers and educators.
“I like to be able to use words like Science of Reading and phonological awareness because parents might be hearing that from their school and think, ‘Oh, that makes me nervous,’ but when I can say that the Science of Reading is just research about how your kid learns to read, best practices, then it can make it more approachable for them,” Polak said.
In addition to the workshops, families can check out literacy kits equipped with books, games and guides for kindergarten through fifth grade students.
The kits focus on developing different reading skills, like how to read words that end in “ed” to indicate a past tense or how to read longer words.
The curriculum and kits were designed by Booksource, a company that provides books and literacy materials for school districts and libraries nationwide.
The library typically offers story time and has librarians trained to help guide caregivers on which books would best suit their students’ needs, but this is the first time the system is offering this type of workshop, according to Kristen Sorth, director and CEO of the library system.
“We try to figure out ways to help the community in so many different ways, and we’ve got resources like diapers and meals, so why not have additional resources to help with reading?” Sorth said.
The workshops will be held across the county’s public libraries throughout the year. Families can register for the workshops and check out kits online.
