Estrellita: Curriculum of Champions
Estrellita is a curriculum developed by Karen Myers. In Spanish, estrellita means "little star," and the purpose of the curriculum is to empower all students to become and to see themselves as star readers. The foundation of the Estrellita curriculum is the "Sonidos Iniciales" (Initial Sounds) chart (my classroom's is shown on the left) and chant, through which students learn to associate graphemes and phonemes. [1]
In September 2011, the kindergarten class in Caraballo began using Estrellita, while the first grade class (my class) used a different curriculum. Both classes began without any phonemic awareness or knowledge of letter sounds. After six weeks of school, the kindergartners were reading complete sentences, while the first graders were still struggling to put two letters together to form a syllable! I switched the first grade class to Estrellita, and within two weeks, they had mastered the concept of forming syllables!
In September 2011, the kindergarten class in Caraballo began using Estrellita, while the first grade class (my class) used a different curriculum. Both classes began without any phonemic awareness or knowledge of letter sounds. After six weeks of school, the kindergartners were reading complete sentences, while the first graders were still struggling to put two letters together to form a syllable! I switched the first grade class to Estrellita, and within two weeks, they had mastered the concept of forming syllables!
While Estrellita may not work for every school, teacher, or student, it helped my students make sense of phonics. My students experienced rapid, almost instant, mastery of phoneme-grapheme pairs and were quickly reading mini-books and writing their own sentences.
[1] Adapted from http://www.estrellita.com