Half of NYC students are behind in reading. Hundreds of CUNY tutors aim to change that.
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Just after the school day winds down, a group of three students at Brooklyn’s P.S. 40 sit in a semicircle and crack open “Looking for Lunch,” an illustrated book with large print. With help from a tutor, they begin reading aloud in unison, running their fingers along words like “hungry” and “animals” as they go.
Next door, a student is working with a one-on-one tutor and struggling with a more basic task: forming the word “tan” using small wooden blocks to represent individual sounds. He’s just beginning to grasp the relationships between sounds and letters.