Putnam Curriculum Supervisor Says Early Literacy Training Intensive Successful

Some 140 Putnam County teachers underwent extensive training on improving elementary school reading skills.

Curriculum Supervisor Jill Ramsey said teachers underwent three weeks of training to emphasizing a sounds-first approach in early literacy teaching. Ramsey said the state has been encouraging districts to move to that learning approach.

“We’ve been doing that in Putnam County for the last three to five years depending on what grade level so it’s not really anything new to us but it really just validated for teachers what they were doing and that it was the right work.”

Ramsey said that the program taught teachers about the science of reading, and why a sounds-first approach is the ideal teaching style for early literacy. She said that because language is natural to children, learning sounds will ease the process of learning to read.

“In working with kids and learning to read, we always start with the sounds that letters make,” Ramsey said. “And really working with them on how you articulate it, how it sounds and then later at the very end of kindergarten after Christmas they start really adding the letter to the sound. So it’s really just working on the sound first, and then putting the code with it so they’re really much stronger readers.”

Ramsey said that teachers initially had 30 hours in a virtual program. She said that despite many long hours in training, the experience has gotten the teachers fired up to return to school.

“Nobody likes to sit in a week training after doing 30 hours online of training,” But really our teachers came out excited about the new school year. First of all they’re excited anyway because they get to go back to school with some sort of normalcy without masks and that sort of hing so they can really focus on instruction. It really just fired them up and got them ready to go into the classroom with all of this new knowledge.”