Dispatch One from the CVUSD Summer Pilot

There's really only one way to describe the first day of any summer school: chaos.

Not the bad kind. The ordinary kind. The kind that happens when a public school district opens its doors for a summer session and everyone, staff and families alike, is figuring out where they're supposed to be. At Mountain Vista, where I'm working, there were lines out the office door of parents signing their kids up the day-of. Everyone was doing their best. But Monday was less a day of instruction than a day of sorting out who was here and where they were going.

So that's how week one began. And honestly, it got more complicated before it got better.

The Sunday Before

The weekend started right. On Sunday I ran a full training refresh with the Read With Me volunteers. There are four of them: Alena, Mike, Sheila, and Peggy. All Coachella Valley residents. All retired. All doing this for one reason, which is that they care about kids and they care about reading. There's no other incentive here. Nobody is getting paid. They show up because literacy matters to them and these children matter to them.

The training landed well. We went through the system, the rotation order, the color coding, how to run a five-minute session, how to handle a child who freezes or guesses. By the end of Sunday, I felt ready. The plan was meticulous, mostly for the volunteers' benefit, so that nobody would feel lost when they sat down across from a kid on Monday.

Then…. the week happened to the plan.

The Curveball

Monday night, after the chaos of day one, we got word from the principals: the cohorts had changed. Instead of the rising Kindergarten, first, and second graders I'd built everything around, we'd be working with TK and Kindergarten students only.

I'll be honest. There was a brief moment where I mourned the planning. All that preparation, recalibrated overnight.

But the silver lining arrived almost instantly, because I knew something about how the system is built. The first three phases of Word Nuts, the letter sounds, the CVC blending, the foundational work, are designed precisely for this age group. The more advanced phases, the magic-e and the complex digraphs, are more effective once a child already has experience with the bolt. Starting younger isn't a compromise. It's the ideal entry point. These are exactly the kids who can get the most out of letter-sound and blending practice, and exactly the kids for whom that early foundation matters most.

By Tuesday I wasn't mourning anything. I was more excited than ever.

How the Week Actually Unfolded

So, here's the real shape of week one, chaos and all.

Monday was a wash b/c the summer school logistics themselves were still being ironed out. Tuesday was assessments, getting baseline scores on every child so we'd know where to begin, and have something to measure against at the end. Wednesday was the first day of real letter-sound work. And Thursday, today, was the day we hit our groove.

Scheduling has been its own puzzle. Some of the volunteers are part time, covering Tuesday and Thursday, or Monday-Wednesday-Friday. Tomorrow is Juneteenth, a holiday, so the week closes after four days. Our seventeen-day work plan has gotten shorter in a lot of places, and I've had to make peace with that. The reality of running an intervention inside a real school calendar is that the calendar wins. You work with the days you actually get.

But Alena and I got four sessions in this week with our respective groups.

And already, the results have been magical.

Back to the Kitchen Table

I'm working only with the TK kids, and sitting down with them takes me right back to the summer I spent doing this with Demi. The same rhythm. The same small moments. The same quiet thrill when a sound clicks.

I'll be honest about something else, though. Some of these children are further behind than Demi was. The range within my group of seven is wide. Some are well along, and I had a couple of them blending their very first words on the bolt today. Others, we're still working with on those very first sounds, building the foundation one letter at a time.

It's like that across the whole pilot. Alena, Mike, Sheila, and Peggy all have kids who run the full range. And strange as it might sound, that range is part of what makes this so powerful. There is so much ground available to cover.

Because here's the thing about a child who knows four of the twenty-six letter sounds: that's not a ceiling. That's a starting line. Moving a child from four sounds to twelve in ten to fifteen days of work would be a remarkable achievement. It wouldn't show up as a headline. But for that child, it's the difference between staring at a word with no way in and having the beginnings of a real strategy. That matters more than any number on a sheet.

What I'm Holding Onto

My goal for these kids is simple. Get them to grade level, and watch a few of them surpass it. I already know some of them will roll into Kindergarten blending CVC words. I also know that for others, the win will be quieter and just as real.

The work ahead is significant, and the compressed timeline doesn't make it easier. I'm not pretending otherwise. But I'm optimistic in a way that's grounded in what I'm seeing in the room, not in what I hoped to see before I got here.

Most of all, I feel lucky. Lucky to sit across from these kids. Lucky to watch the moment a child blends their first word and looks up with that particular kind of joy, the kind that comes from doing something they weren't sure they could do. That moment is why any of this exists. I got to see it a few times this week. I'll get to see it more.

Week one is done. We found our groove on the last day we had. Next week, we build on it.

This is the second post in a weekly series documenting the Word Nuts Reading summer pilot in Coachella Valley Unified School District. New updates are posted each Thursday or Friday throughout the program.

Michael Land is the founder of Word Nuts Reading, a sound-first early literacy system built around 3D-printed phonics manipulatives. Patent pending.