I built Word Nuts at my kitchen table because my daughter needed something that wasn't working yet, and this is what finally worked. That part of the story lives elsewhere on this site.

This post is about what happened when I tried it on kids who weren't mine.

This past summer, a transitional kindergarten summer program let me run a small pilot inside a real classroom. Seven kids, none of whom I'd taught before. No lab, no controlled setting, just a room full of five and six year olds with field trips and off days and everything else a real summer program actually has (like an outbreak of hand foot and mouth disease).

I ran sessions with this group almost every weekday for four weeks.

Here's what happened.

Every one of the seven kids left knowing more letter sounds than they came in with. The gains ranged from four sounds to seventeen. Four of the seven cleared out their entire pile of sounds they simply couldn't produce at all, every one of those letters gets an answer now. The other three cleared six to eight sounds apiece. All seven started the summer unable to blend or read a single word. Four of them can now, sounding out a word for the first time, tracing the letter, stretching the sound, watching it click.

One boy in the group kept asking to be picked.

He'd entered with nothing. All twenty-six sounds unknown. In the early sessions, I'd hold up a flashcard and he'd say "I don't know," and mean it completely. There was no wrong guess to build from, because there wasn't a guess at all. That's what zero letter-sound knowledge actually looks like.

He kept raising his hand anyway. Five and six year olds do not beg to do a worksheet. Whatever was happening in those few minutes at the table, it wasn't homework to him. By the end of the summer he'd pulled eight sounds out of that pile completely and had four mastered. Smaller numbers than some of the other kids in the group. I'd put it up against any of them.

I want to be straight about what seven kids can and can't prove. This is a case series, not a study. There's no comparison group. I built the system and I ran the pilot myself, which matters and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't. What I can tell you is what I watched happen, in a room I stood in nearly every day, with kids I have no reason to have gotten lucky with seven times in a row.

I'm sharing the full findings because I'd rather you see the whole picture than just the parts that make the best pull quote. Every child's numbers, the method, the caveats spelled out in full…

Get the findings here.