Sound Partners
Last Revised: December 5, 2025
- Issue Areas
- K-12 education
- Outcomes
- Elementary and middle school success
Program overview
Improving reading outcomes: Sound Partners is an early literacy tutoring program for students in grades K-3. The program is associated with improved reading comprehension, reading fluency, and alphabetics.
Structured supplemental reading instruction: Sound Partners provides supplemental reading instruction, typically as part of a pull-out or after school tutoring program. The program is highly structured and designed to be delivered one-on-one by tutors, paraprofessionals, and teacher assistants with minimal educational training and experience. Sessions last 30 minutes and occur four or five days a week.
Scaffolding learning: The program covers multiple early literacy skills, including phoneme blending, decoding and encoding phonetically regular words, reading irregular high-frequency words, and more. Students apply these skills through storybook reading practice. The program is appropriate for K-1 students who are learning to read and for students in grades 2-3 who need more intensive reading intervention.
- Strategies
-
Literacy curricula and interventions
- Cost
-
$247-$307 per tutoring kit
Multiple studies with rigorous designs demonstrate that Sound Partners is a well-established program for improving reading achievement among K-3 students.
A 2011 randomized controlled trial found that students who participated in Sound Partners tutoring showed improved alphabetics, phonological awareness, word reading, spelling, and comprehension relative to members of the control group.
A 2010 randomized controlled trial found that students enrolled in Sound Partners increased their reading performance as measured by alphabetics, word reading, spelling, passage reading fluency, and comprehension relative to non-participating students.
A 2010 systematic review found that Sound Partners improved reading fluency, reading comprehension, and alphabetics.
Prepare tutors for implementation: While the Sound Partners program requires minimal training to deliver, schools should introduce tutors to the curriculum before implementation. Voyager Sopris Learning, which developed the Sound Partners program, provides schools with a detailed implementation manual and handbooks for tutors, as well as a recorded on demand training for tutors.
Identify students who need additional support: Schools should select students for their Sound Partners program based on a diagnostic literacy assessment. The program is most appropriate as supplemental instruction for K-2 students or as a remedial reading intervention for students in grades 2-3 who require additional support to achieve grade level standards in reading.
Hire or recruit tutors: The Sound Partners program can be delivered by volunteer tutors, paraprofessionals, or teacher assistants. Schools may determine whether to use volunteers or paid staff based on the number of students participating and whether the program will be offered during or after school. Community-based organizations may be a source of volunteers for a tutoring program.
Use data to monitor progress: Schools should use data to monitor student progress. These data can be used to identify areas where students require additional support. Periodic literacy assessments and/or structured observations by tutors may be used to collect data on student achievement. The Sound Partners program includes mastery tests following each lesson set which can help facilitate data collection.