The Opp Blog

Soundabet is the name of the program started by Dan Gurney in the late 1990′s to help teach his kindergarten class phonemes.  Research has shown that successfully teaching children to read requires five areas to be thoroughly taught; and phonemic awareness is the starting point followed by phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension.

Here is a video of one of Dan’s kindergarten classes “performing” the Soundabet song, where they sound out the letters of the alphabet.

Dan has taught kindergarten in Northern California for over 25 years.  You can follow him online, both at his Soundabet blog, as well as his Mr. Kindergarten blog for his school.

We are excited to have Dan present Soundabet at our Teacher Training Institute this summer, July 17th.

If you have time you may wish to watch this video of Nanci Bell delivering a lecture at the M.I.N.D. Institute about the nature of reading difficulties.  It is not training per se, but rather a discussion about the research behind reading problems and the intervention techniques that are being used to reach these students.

Opportunity Schools uses Lindamood-Bell’s research-based intervention as part of our program’s curricula, so Nanci’s lecture may be especially interesting to our parents and teachers alike.  It is a little over an hour long, so be prepared… it’s academic, but well worth the watch.