First grade students gather at the front in Sarah Kasco’s classroom at Minne Lusa Elementary.

“Green grapes grow in the garden,” Kasco says to them.

Her class works on alliteration. They're practicing the ‘guh’ sound as Kasco describes it.

“Remember, alliteration is when you have the same sound at the beginning of a word. Listen to me while I do the first one,” she tells them.

The students quickly repeat the words aloud. Through interactive lessons, they learn to sound out new words.

“We have to sound out the words and blend them so we can learn how to read,” Oryn Nelson, Minne Lusa Elementary first grader. “Because if we didn’t know how to read, then we wouldn’t know how to write letters.”

The Science of Reading emphasizes direct instruction in five essential areas: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Omaha Public Schools is implementing these principles through structured literacy – lessons designed to build word recognition, phonological awareness, decoding and sight word reading skills.

All kindergarten through second grade teachers across our district use the same structured literacy curriculum. This effort is part of our district’s Moonshot goal of ensuring all students read at grade level by 2030.

In Shanee Samuel’s second grade class at Minne Lusa Elementary, students are working on blending sounds—combining individual sounds to form whole words.

“The foundational skills of structured literacy are great. It’s repetition, systematic, clear and direct,” said Samuel. “Not only are the students engaged the entire time, but they’re doing the work that it takes to be good readers.”

Structured literacy lessons are held at the same time each morning across our district. This ensures that every student in every classroom receives consistent reading instruction every day.

“I love that it’s in the morning because it sets us up for the rest of the day,” said Samuel. “When we’re reading in science or social studies, those reading skills blend throughout the day.”

Last year, Samuel and Kasco were among more than 400 Omaha Public Schools teachers who engaged in Science of Reading training with the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO).

“What’s great about that class is that we have an understanding of how many pieces there are to the Science of Reading,” said Kasco. “Now we’re part of a team that gets to share that with more teachers.”