Student Spotlight: Owen

     YokyWorks education specialists have the privilege of knowing and teaching some of the coolest kids around! This month’s student spotlight is Owen, a bright and thoughtful first grader who has been with YokyWorks for 10 months, during which time he has participated in sessions with enthusiasm and focus. He will soon be finished with the YokyWorks program!      

He loves to catch lizards and play ice hockey, and would like to improve his skateboarding skills. Owen also shared that he is really good at monkey bars and thinking of inventions.

     Owen’s favorite part of his YokyWorks sessions is playing Roll and Read, where he gets to roll a dice and “race” 5 or 6 word lists against each other. He also likes playing Reading Tic Tac Toe with his education specialist Camila. Owen said that Camila has taught him about “the floss rule, the vowel before “R”, and a bunch of other spelling rules that make reading easy”. During his time with us, Owen was able to quadruple both his word reading fluency and his oral reading fluency! Owen is now quite a reader - he enjoys reading animal and nature books - and he is a big fan of plants and nature. 

     Owen explained that if he were a reading teacher, he would make sure that his students know “all the sounds of all the letters''. His favorite thing about his YokyWorks teacher is that she makes lessons fun! We are so proud of Owen’s hard work - he is an amazing example of how early intervention and structured literacy instruction can bring a student up to grade level and boost their confidence in themselves.