Bilingual 3-Tier team unveils Reading Games at teacher training in Brownsville
The Vaughn Gross Center’s Bilingual 3-Tier team traveled south on Jan. 27 to train 30 Brownsville ISD kindergarten teachers on the new, innovative educational tool Juegos de Lectura, or Reading Games.
“There is nothing out there like it,” said Kathryn Prater, “especially in Spanish.”
Created by Sylvia Linan-Thompson, Prater, Sharon Vaughn, and Elizabeth Villarreal-Perales and designed by Carlos Treviño, Reading Games is a reading intervention curriculum for kindergarten students who experience difficulty learning to read in English or Spanish. Reading Games provides systematic, intensive, and supportive instruction designed to accelerate kindergarten students’ learning and to prevent reading difficulties in grades 1 and 2. The lessons target the knowledge and skills that have the highest impact on learning to read — phonemic awareness, alphabetic knowledge, decoding, and spelling. The teacher plays Practice Games with all students, teaching the targeted skills. Then students work in teams of two and play Team Games to review and practice skills.
The Brownsville teachers — two-thirds of whom conduct their classes in Spanish — already had completed Tier I training from non-Center instructors before the training on the Tier II Reading Games. They will implement the research-based program through April, and then tests will gauge the effectiveness of the intervention. The Center will follow and create Tier II and Tier III instruction for this same cohort of students through grade 3.
The Center also has offered to train the control group of kindergarten teachers next year.
Several other educators key to the project’s success were at the training last month, including mentors, who work with teachers in the classrooms to implement curriculum; observers, who will monitor intervention validity and English language development indicators; and first-grade teachers, who will teach the students next year using the 3-Tier Reading Model.
“We don’t just throw the curriculum at them and say, ‘Do it,’” Prater said.
Velma Afanador-Pérez of the Spotlight 3-Tier team also took part in the training. She will oversee implementation of the intervention in Del Valle ISD kindergarten classes.
Elsa Hagen of the University of Houston helped to organize the Brownsville training.