Student Spotlight: Leila

One of the best things about being a YokyWorks education specialist is that we have the opportunity to build relationships with kind and playful students like Leila, this month’s Student Spotlight.

Leila has loved her time with YokyWorks so much, she declared that if she could, she would continue attending sessions until she gets to college! But, as much as we enjoyed our time with her, Leila doesn’t need to keep attending sessions. She is a graduate! 

After working with her YokyWorks teacher, Sydney, for 6 months, Leila is now in the 99th percentile of phonemic awareness. After reaching this milestone, Leila continued her instruction in phonics and ultimately doubled her scores in letter naming, nonsense word fluency, and word reading fluency. According to Leila, “the most important thing to learn,” if she were the teacher, would be trigraphs. “‘Light’ has a trigraph. It’s i g h.” Leila advises. She is on her way to being a first grade “reading specialist”. Go Leila! 

This playful seven year old shared that she loved reading sentences during her sessions, and says her favorite thing that she learned is reading - “reading is something I can do now that I could not do before coming to YokyWorks”. She added, “I would not have been able to read Wild Adventures before coming to YokyWorks. But now I can!” 

Leila is eagerly awaiting her 8th birthday this November. Her favorite thing to do is play - she likes to play games on her iPad, the board game Sorry!, entertaining her stuffies, and playing ‘The Floor is Lava’ on the playground with her friends at school. She also loved having fun with her YokyWorks teachers - her favorite YokyWorks games are sound dot bingo and tic tac toe. 

Leila believes her biggest superpower is kindness, and she explains that if she were a superhero she would be the type that saves people, because that is the kind thing to do. 

Leila is an inspiring example of how early intervention is failure prevention in reading. We are so proud of Leila and all her hard work, and we are excited to watch her continue to thrive on her reading journey.