Running into the Fog with Heather Kenny
“Teachers default to practices that they experienced themselves as a student,” explains Heather Kenny, President of Unleashed Innovation, Inc. and Creator of Sounder & Friends™. Educator turned entrepreneur, Heather has a deep understanding of the power of literacy to inform one’s life trajectory. Unfortunately, progress is quite slow in the educational world surrounding evidence-based practices; instead, new teachers tend to revert back to the strategies that they encountered as students, which are oftentimes out-of-date and not nearly as effective as newer models.
Heather first began to develop her passion for literacy as a kindergarten teacher at an overcrowded elementary school. In this role, she quickly realized that the most important gift she could give her students was the gift of literacy. One of Heather’s coworkers at the time learned about the concept of phonemic awareness, which is the ability to hear and play with individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. Heather began brainstorming ways she could introduce a great focus on phonemic awareness into her classroom to lay the groundwork for her students’ future reading instruction.
Fast forward to 2021, Heather has now created an engaging and entertaining way for kids to develop their phonemic awareness in the form of Sounder & Friends™, an educational adventure show. Tune into this week’s episode of Running Into the Fog for a conversation with Heather about literacy, phonemic awareness and her journey from educator to entrepreneur.
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