Hamden Hall’s comprehensive early reading program incorporates decades-long research and evidence regarding the best way to teach children to lift words off of a page, according to Dr. Evelyn Russo, a research affiliate at Yale University’s Haskins Laboratories.

“A lot of schools are trying to capture that piece– those key components – that Hamden Hall already embraces. We know that everything depends on great oral language development,” Dr. Russo said at an early morning campus presentation that broke down the parts of the literacy puzzle for parents.

Phoneme awareness, code, and fluency are the critical components for students to master reading at an early age.

“For 3- and 4-year-olds, phoneme awareness is really critical. If you don’t have it, you can’t lift the words off the pages. In order to read, your brain must separate the sounds in a spoken word,” maintained Dr. Russo, who also serves as Hamden Hall’s reading consultant and is a past and current parent – son Matthew is a senior.

To help in the classroom (phoneme awareness is very abstract, so Hamden Hall educators strive to make learning fun and concrete), Dr. Russo introduces three puppets to her students: Ink, Link, and Sonar.

Sonar helps with the sound component – thus his oversized ears. “He’s a sound catcher,” Dr. Russo told parents. So for the word “hat,” Sonar snatches the three sounds inherent in the word out of the student’s mouth. Then Link steps in to help connect letters to the sounds (in other words, he handles the code component). Finally, Ink tackles the meaning of the word with a photo or drawing.

A video of the puppets at work in a Hamden Hall classroom captured an “a-ha” moment for one child. “I like that guy,” the child says of Sonar. “I love sounds, but I never saw them before.”

At Hamden Hall, phoneme awareness instruction has been in place since 2005. Dr. Russo began mentoring Hamden Hall Lower School faculty at that time on the Haskins reading initiative, which is based on the scientific studies of two research projects: Early Reading Success and Mastering Reading Instruction. The studies were undertaken, Dr. Russo said, after a national reading panel in 2000 concluded that 60 percent of children in the United States were not proficient readers.

Founded in 1935 and located in New Haven, Haskins Laboratories is a private, non-profit research institute with a primary focus on speech, language and reading, and their biological basis. Haskins has a long-standing, formal affiliation with Yale and the Yale Reading Center at the Yale University School of Medicine is located there.

With the foundation in place for Hamden Hall’s youngest readers, their elder counterparts, in grades 4 through 6, build off of what they learned in the earlier grades and continue enhancing their literacy skills and comprehension. Dr. Russo also noted Hamden Hall’s commitment to small reading groups and the daily 20 to 30 minutes of quality reading instruction that each student receives.

“You really become analytical figuring this all out,” she said of students. “This is really complex and our Hamden Hall teachers are trained in all of this. The days of memorizing words and taking a test have been proven to not work.