One at a time, Ashley Rollins held up a flash card and had a student read the word aloud. The process repeated as a second and then third flash card was stacked in front of each student.
At times, Rollins asked students to identify which of the words was a verb or a noun.
The rising fourth graders were participating in their intervention block at East Ridge Elementary’s Summer Reach program, the learning camp that Hamilton County public schools have offered since 2020. In that intervention time, students build up their foundational literacy skills, improving their reading fluency and filling in any gaps in their knowledge of letter sounds, said Breckan Duckworth, the district’s executive director of opportunity and gap closure.
Summer Reach, which is open to all rising kindergarten through ninth grade students, helps to combat summer slide — the decline in academic skills that students can experience when out of school. That learning loss happens especially with students who may not have had access to camps or other learning experiences over the summer, Duckworth said.