Let's Talk with Leaha & Rhonda

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This is a que un the studio's original program.

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The following is a paid program sponsored by Crawford management group and smart time consultants. Please be advised that the voices and opinions you hear do not represent the views of 91.5 Jazz and more the University of Nevada Las Vegas or the Board of Regents of Nevada System of Higher Education.

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Hi, my name is Leah Crawford.

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And I'm Rhonda Nolan.

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And you're listening to the let's talk with Leah and Rhonda show for all the

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beautiful entrepreneurs out there. This is for you. Good morning. Las Vegas. Happy Saturday morning. Lea. How are you doing?

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You're crying because you know what? It's

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so hot outside. I'm sitting here just thinking. All right. It is so hot, right? It's like I I was downtown walking to go get a salad from Container Park. Lovely place a container. I love container Container Park. So I had my phone in my hand. I had to move my arm because it got so hot because it's so hot outside. And I'm like, okay, Lee, you can't walk to the you know, you can't walk and hold your phone like you used to. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna have to figure out how I'm gonna talk. I don't know if I had to carry

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something with me. So now you're gonna have to get the earphones I got the earphones and you ain't not gonna get to know the earphones in your ears and then have the phone in your purse. And then that way your phone is covered from the sun. And you have your earphones and you can still talk because I have earphones. Well I still have so some people have wireless. I still have the ones that are wired so it has the microphone in the wire Park. So when I have them plugged into my phone, I can still talk on my phone.

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Okay, so you know the new phones don't have the spot net on knees where you can plug in so you have to use the air the wireless earbuds.

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Wow. Okay, but no, I

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walked in. And I said okay, so we got to come up with another solution. Because unless I just don't talk while I'm walking. But that's not fun either. Well,

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I sometimes I have that fanny pack thing on and I will say I have a wire. I've got a fanny

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pack in my purse and then carry. I want to walk. Just gotta have it's.

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It's a lot going on. It's high. It is hot. You know, on Wednesday of this week, it got to 121 120 Hold 2120 In the middle of June in the middle of July. July. That's where we are in the middle of July. That's right. I don't even know what month it is in the middle

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of July. You had

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120 on a Wednesday at like one o'clock. I was like what happened? You

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know, funny story though. I was. I was out last Saturday after the show and the grocery stores and it was midday. So it was hot. It was midday. There was nobody in the store. I was like you want to know what this is what I'm gonna go shop. There was nobody everybody was somewhere cool, right? They weren't in a grocery store. And I was like, This is what I'm a local group. This is what I am going to go grocery shopping last week

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because it was the fourth of July. I went in on Monday and grocery shop was packed, wasn't it? No, it was it was not packed. It was it was nice. I had nice food. I was nice and cool because I wanted to beat the people because I figured the people was gonna be there by Tuesday and Wednesday. Okay, so I said let me go in here on Monday and beat two people and get everything I may want to eat. No, it was so

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cool. It was nobody was in the store. I was like 120 degree. Yeah, but I immediately got in my car went back home into my hunt. Yeah, I'm gonna look out into it. Yeah. Hi. Yeah, even the bugs laying on it. They like it's hot. We want to fly I was just gonna lay is high is high. That's

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okay. It's always hot. We're used to it. That's why we love Las Vegas. So we're not complaining but we just 6am is beautiful. Yes, it's Oh, yeah, five is beautiful. It's wonderful.

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Beautiful. That's when I'm walking. I'm walking. Yeah, walking every day walking five

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6am Ladies and gentlemen, you should be up and out there because it is gorgeous. Gorgeous out there getting your exercise and burn those calories off. You know when you're sexy.

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Alright, so today we have Luke we'll talk about reading today. I think we should talk about Ray it's a perfect time to talk about reading. Yeah, because why you sit in the house you can read That's right. You can read a book while you keep him cool by keeping cool white people Cool. Well, today we have Miss Eleanor Cormier on here it project 300 learning Early Learning Academy got it right project 300 early Land Academy. Elena, welcome to the show. Thank you. Okay, well, welcome. Alright, so background who are you? Who is Eleanor? Eleanor? Well, I'm

Unknown Speaker 4:47
a retired teacher. Yes, I have taught preschool, kindergarten all the way up to third grade. And even when I was in the classroom, there was always a need for help, you know, especially To the end the early grades. And even after I retired, I wanted to do something to still help the students. And so working with some of my friends, we came up with this program. And we originally wanted to help with the interventions, because mostly I worked in Title One schools where you had so many of the students who are working below level. And so you have to do interventions, and they call that tier two. And so aside from Tier one is like your regular lesson that the teacher has to teach. But tier two is when like, I take Johnny, who is reading below level, and you have to do an extra 20 minutes with him. But in the classroom, these classes are having like 1520 kids that are working below level. So you have to do those small groups, or those interventions with all those kids, which it gets, it's not even a small group anymore. You know, small group is maybe four kids, I was gonna say the font small, yeah, it when I was in there, if there was more than four kids in the group, it wasn't small anymore, then you had people constantly coming, you have seven, eight kids in the group, that's not a small group anymore. But you have to do these interventions. And so even this program, I was like, this would be great to help provide some of those interventions, while we couldn't get the schools to go along with us or let us in. But it would have been perfect, because we're online, if we came in with our tutors there online, you could work one on one with those students to provide some of those interventions. So since we could not come into the schools, we ended up being an after school program. And we worked with the students for we didn't have a lot of students. So originally, we were going to do 20 minutes. So we have let them do 30 minutes instead. And they work one on one with their tutor, we start off with an assessment. And then that kind of tells us where the students are. Out of the 31 students that we have worked with, the majority of them are still working on a kindergarten level. And some of these are students in the first second, even third grade. But we you know, continue to work with them at their level. And that's been the beautiful thing about this program. Even some of the teachers have said, when they were in the classroom, they could not work one on one with the students, but when they started tutoring for us, and we're able to, you know, work with one on one with some of those same students, because one of them was able to bring in students from her classroom, she got some of them to sign up. And she was like, I never got to work with him, you know, one on one like that. And so they really, you know, all of our people are former teachers, educators. And so they the teachers really enjoy the program also. And you're I'm gonna,

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I know, probably, you know, change your pace. You know, it's one thing when you're in a room with 25 or 30 Kids Oh, yeah. What is the difference when you can work one on one, one or two, you know, at a time. Right? Right. Yeah, so, so tell us about your program. Tell us a little more about your program.

Unknown Speaker 8:07
So the students log in with the tutor, we start out with an assessment. And like I said, we can tell where they what level they need to work on. And we do use the program reading A to Z, we do pay for that. But even the schools like that program, because they have a lot of like the little books that you can print for the students. And we do do that also, because we like to put books in the student's hand. But the student works with the tutor three times a week for 30 minutes at a time. And then they're they have copies of their lessons also, so that the parent can review those lessons with them. We want them to read with the parent every day. And that's a big part of the program. This year, the students read over 600 books from January to June, because we keep track of that and they got incentives for their reading. And so, you know, just trying to bring the students up in those foundational skills, which are phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency, reading comprehension, alphabetic knowledge, because if you don't know the ABCs, you know, knowing you can't even start you can't you can't even start Yeah, high frequency words. And then, you know, once they start understanding that or being able to do that the students start enjoying to read, you know, because you do have to learn to read and then learn to read for understanding. There's a lot of the students.

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So let's stop right there. Let's take a look because let's let's let's delve deeper into that because let's break it down. If you don't know your ABCs you can't even begin the process.

Unknown Speaker 9:47
No, you can't you cannot. They start out with like, say you learn the ABCs we had a student who was in the second grade and the person who Who was taken care of him said he can't read. So we start working with him and he was a perfect candidate. Okay, so we start working with you knew some of the ABC, so we start getting them stronger in that. And then you have to start putting words together like what they call the CVC words, consonant, vowel, consonant, cat, bat hat. And when they start seeing that, oh, I can do that the ball goes off. Yeah, the confidence in those kids, it's amazing, you do have to build their confidence, and let them know that you can do this, you know, and because we're working at their level one on one with them, it's no embarrassment, you know, of working with, you know, to other kids, or around, or, but they, they really do start to grow and bloom, you know, when they can even understand those CVC words. And then if the parent or whoever is working with them, continues to work with him on those sight words. Because you know, that eventually, we start off saying, okay, these are the consonant vowel consonant words. And these are the rules for such and such words. You know, eventually those rules don't even apply to words just go all over the place. But just if you can just get them on that path where they start reading, you know, like the go dog go books, you know, and you remember,

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doctors, doctors, Dr. Seuss, those were so my mother out there. Um, that, but then I memorize. Well, the thing about it is, I remember Sesame Street. Well, not even Sesame Street doctor. I mean, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood was my favorite show. Growing up. So you know, PBS had the morning programming where it was Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, and the electric company. And every morning, you watched, I mean, they had the letter today on Sesame Street, and you had you know, they had different words, and you were dancing to the word. Do you think that that's missing from our own? Absolutely

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it is. The kids are on YouTube, when I hear people say and and see some of these students, three and four years old on YouTube. And that's what they are watching our videos on YouTube. And they said on Tik Tok, but I have seen them on YouTube. They're not saying the ABCs No, no, they that's not what they're doing. Right? Look

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at your face. Real easy, because the abs, I mean, but it's, I guess it's so fundamental. It is learning your ABC, you

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have to you have to I had a student who was in kindergarten. And even though her mom had just had a baby, she didn't just have a baby, that didn't mean that she's supposed to stop learning, you know, and it takes the parent, the parent has to be concerned, because eventually you want these students to grow up and be independent adults. But if they fall down, they can they stop wanting to learn, they stopped wanting to go to school, you know, and that that goes all the way up through high school. You know, those are, they have told us multiple times how they use the third grade reading scores to decide how many prisons they're going to build. And that that is very discouraging. And, but that's where we did one program, we called it it takes a village, that it's not just the school, you know, where somebody said, Well, I sent you to school, and you're gonna learn all this. It's just so much going on at school now. And then you have so many different you know, all those different personalities of the students and you know, all the stuff that's going on, you have to put that extra time into working with that student. Because all of our students that I showed you some of their scores have progress at whatever level they were on. So

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I like the fact that you assess and you meet them where they are. You meet them where they are, and move them Yeah, so that they can reach reach the great level. Hopefully that they are in but third grade. Yeah,

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cuz and their grade is a pivotal year. It is and they're they're even saying I've seen it on the news several times were starting, I think next year, they're they're supposed to retain students who cannot read at a certain level by the third grade. They have a program in Nevada called read by three. And so so I'm talking about rebuy three for a while, but I know what they've been talking about. For some but they have not retained the kid they have not retained children. No, because emigre will be overcrowded. They are talking about retaining them now. And and that's where we really wanted the kindergarteners and so like I said we start picking up more preschoolers which they have been doing amazing. The preschoolers, you know, how

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early do you think? Okay, so what is the age that you think it is ideal for a child to even start to learn their ABCs? I

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would say three you can start at three but you Even through my whole career, I thought four year olds should be in school because I started out working in preschool. And those four year olds, they were amazing. You know, they just want to learn so much. And they're just so ready. I think I really feel like that's a wasted year in Nevada, kindergarten is not mandatory. Steel. Right. And so

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so the one part they can never have they can divert, or have they gone to a full day yet? I don't I'm not I've not

Unknown Speaker 15:27
I have not been at school in the last year. But I think they do still have some part day or half day kindergarten, I think they still do have some, but like I said, if the four year old by four, they should know their ABCs sounds Yeah. Other words, you have to know the letter names and the sounds. And identifying. That's, that is all a part of it, not just saying it, which they ended and singing the ABC song is just the beginning. But then you show somebody you're like, you're doing a little assessment, and somebody says, What are the students who just sit down with the paper start singing ABC, but they don't know, that matters, which was, you know, you have to point to each one and learn it, especially when they get to that LMNOP. You know, yeah, I

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think that's one word. One word. I'm not.

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So it's funny, the kids, I do enjoy working with the kids. But that one on one tutoring, it has really been amazing. I mean, all of our students, some of them, we have a couple that no one is going to go to gate. And I started out with him as

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and what what is gate? Well, gate is gifted

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and talented, gifted and talented program. Talented educators. Yeah, gifted and talented education. Yes, two of the students are actually going to gate and one of them is going to a magnet school. And the one that's going to the magnet school, I did start working with him when he first went to kindergarten. So he knew the ABCs. And so we, we start, we use a program that and it's free online, easy, CBM,

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slow down, slow down, slow down.

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Easy CBLEZEASYC.

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B now

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and is a free program. And you can assess the student at their level, you know, it has, like ABCs and, and fluency. Now fluency is when they're reading passages. But even for the ABCs, the student, what they do is for one minute like you have a page of ABCs. And they're reading it for one minute, and so it just strengthened some in what they're doing. Alright,

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so you've been listening to the less awkward Lea and Rhonda show. I'm Lea Crawford.

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I'm Rhonda Nolan. And we are here on this warm Saturday morning with you in Las Vegas. And we're getting ready for a big week. But I will tell you about that a little bit later in the show.

Unknown Speaker 18:00
Okay, but let's go back to them. So let me What if the parent can't read?

Unknown Speaker 18:07
That is difficult. But what we can do, like I said, they work with the tutor three times a week and we can work hand

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that parent also. Because sometimes it's embarrassing. And I I can't read. I have been surviving. Not being because I understand signs I can count, but unnecessarily can read. So how can I assist my child? Can they join in with the program that you're working with the children, the

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parent could work get, they could sit along with the student. But now we wouldn't just say we're going to work just singularly with the program, we would probably help that parent find an adult program to help them but far as the student needing to listen to books we could find, you know, audio that

Unknown Speaker 19:01
could be a challenge because I that I have not because Dr. Seuss some of the more of it is because they the words together and it gets to be kind of confusing. And I remember being a child reading it to other children and they were like, I don't understand it. So if the parent doesn't as the parent can't read what I mean? Well, I

Unknown Speaker 19:23
have not ran into that problem yet, I will say because most of our material has been like a low level like only up to third grade. And so most of the parents have been okay with that. But like I said for the student if it was something that they could not read, we could find audio. You know, like even if we were using Dr. Seuss, we could find that on audio. And the library has an amazing resources you know, where they have all kinds of audio books, the video books. Those stories are on YouTube. There are so many resources now Yeah, they are. Because like I said, even the ABCs, you can find that on YouTube and where they're singing the ABC and showing the letter, yeah, showing the letters. And if the students do that at least once a day, you know, they do start catching on at that young age. Those four and five year olds, they catch on so quick, and just that repeated practice. That's what they need repeated practice, even with the sight words, just those basic words? And is the, you know, the basic sight words. Because those are the most common words in the English language, you're gonna see those for the rest of your life and over again. Yeah. And so when you start learning the basics, that's when they really start understanding. Even in one of these comments, one of the kids said, now that he was six, he enjoys reading. Well,

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I know the thing about because I,

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she's an avid reader.

Unknown Speaker 20:53
I know. So I'm an avid reader. I'm an avid reader, I read for, I mean, books all over all types of books. And I remember being a parent having a child that it was difficulty, and it was a teacher in her third grade year that sat down with her, because, you know, I put her in one of those English Spanish immersion schools. So all the textbooks were in Spanish, it was a lot. And I don't know what I was thinking. But by the time she got to third grade, I realized maybe I did her a disservice because she was having challenges reading. But I can tell you today, she's an attorney, and she's a professor at an adjunct professor at Villanova, a law professor, so doing the work, and we had to do the work, and I didn't know what to do. I couldn't read. And I'm like, Well, I was reading books. I was doing this. And it just wasn't working. But I used someone came in and did this for me, which changed Prower Oh, tremendously, because now she sometimes like, did you have to read that. And you also you can read the whole thing. Okay, go ahead and read the whole thing. And because she doesn't know, me, being an attorney, you know, reading is on a different level for her name. And she enjoys it. That's amazing. She enjoys it now the sun I have, you know, yeah. And he can read? No, he can read so. But for us, it is getting him to enjoy reading. Yeah, that's the hard part. Yeah, getting him to an app, you know, getting him to enjoy reading.

Unknown Speaker 22:27
Because you do want students to learn to read for pleasure. Yeah, you know, and many of the students we have they start out some of the ones who can read, they would just they know that they're gonna get assessed on read how many words they can read per minute. That's the fluency. And so they just try to read fast and read through it. But you but that's

Unknown Speaker 22:47
not let's see, the thing about it is is I know, for me, going to online reading was hard. Because I read with my fingers. I learned I read with my fingers. And I read with my fingers in a pen, because I'm checking, underlying, underlining, looking up words, and I'm doing a whole bunch while I'm reading. Especially, you know, when it gets to be more complicated texts. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 23:09
And that's a big part of what we tried to do with some of those students. Okay, yes, you are going to get assessed for fluency. But now, let's slow down. And one of the things that we did was give them bookmarkers, you know, to keep your place up and ask questions, and a lot of them have to write out what is the answer to this? Or you have to ask them, What was that about? You know,

Unknown Speaker 23:32
how do you deal with the transition now, because since everything is online, because I'm on I'm in the online program, well, and it is a different transition to read on the screen, because I'm not and at first, I was printing a bunch of stuff. And it was a lot for me. To too much paper, it's killing a tree. Well, how do you I mean, because everything is going to take off, everything is gone digitally.

Unknown Speaker 23:56
I understand. We give them copies of their lessons. And so while Johnny is at home, I'm just using the name Johnny and I'm projecting whatever the lesson is on the screen. I have already given Johnny's family a folder with the same paper that we're going to be working on and so when I say we're on Lesson three and go dog go, you know, go take he can take that book out he has the book in front of him and the paper that he can work on because he has just worked and totally on screen for little kids is difficult. So no we do provide them with the material for tutoring so that he can actually do that. And then some of them do get you know oh I can't find my book today where we'll you know, read it online, but I do give them the material that's a big part of what we do.

Unknown Speaker 24:48
I love it because it's not only than reading them writing writing in cursive

Unknown Speaker 24:51
oh my god a whole nother issue. That's a whole nother Well, nice question. Not cursive but and I started to print some of these papers that I had Did screenshots of but just seeing what some of these students and I will say is mostly boys that had difficulty writing. And if nobody's paying attention to it, I had one student that when he wrote his name, you're supposed to be, you know, on the line going across, he had one letter going on each line going down, you know, he put it on the line, okay? You know, but some of them, they have no concept if nobody is sitting there saying, This is what you do. And when I saw some of them, even though I'm on online, looking at what they do, because I make them show me their paper, I was horrified. And I had to recruit the parents and say, he needs to see this. Yeah, he needs to write two sentences every day. Let your kid help you write the grocery list, you know, and just give them stuff make up a story. But they had to start, I have to get the parents to say he needs to write two sentences, he needs to put the letters on the line. Because in the classroom, it was different, we would have like a little rubric. And you try to get the kids to understand this is how you get a one on the rubric. This is how you get it to, you know, and how you do that. And then when they would write, and they could look at their paper, and they were posed to say, Oh, I got one because I did this. I got it too, because I did that. So we tried to do some of that. But with the reading, it was too much to try to do a total writing program. But I'm not saying that it's not needed because it is it is because even how to write a letter how to how to put a weird a return address on an envelope goes we little stuff just getting them to write a sentence and put it on the line. We just getting them to that point. That was huge. That was huge for these kids. Yes, it really was. Because they were yelling at the tutor. I had them screaming at me had cry in all kinds of stuff.

Unknown Speaker 26:55
Oh, wow. That is emotional. Alright, so you've been listening to Eleonore Coronae. I want to thank you for coming onto the show. She can be contacted at 702-685-1973 Again, 702-685-1973. Rhonda, I know you got some stuff to talk about. I do

Unknown Speaker 27:13
but I also want to say if you want to look at Project 300, a little closer Early Learning Academy project. 300 academy.com is the website so you can go to the website, you can learn more information about the organization. And if you would like to get you know, a special tutor for your child, you should talk to miss Chroma and her organization because they will be able to help you out but yes, this week is a big week in Las Vegas NAACP. Yeah, here. They'll be at Caesars Hotel and Casino and they're working very closely with the local chapter. And they're all types of things for people to do all week. And so

Unknown Speaker 27:49
I want to say shots out to the president Mr. Quinton savoir. Yes, it is here it is time to all the local NAACP members, boots on the ground next week. We get to show the country what we do here locally in Las Vegas. That's

Unknown Speaker 28:05
right. That's right in there a lot of events is happening for the local community, the NAACP, las vegas.org. Local website to find out what events are happening in your area. All right, until next week, Zaarly. Until next week, everybody be cool, be safe, drink lots of water and keep those

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electronics safe out there because you do not want your cell phone to go out. Because it's overheated. Until next week, peace and blah

Unknown Speaker 28:30
next week. Peace and blessings.

Unknown Speaker 28:32
Bye. Bye and thank you

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