About Me

    Hello, let me introduce myself.  I am Keyleigh Hennessy.  I am a former third-grade teacher turned reading interventionist.  My husband and I are both teachers, he teaches orchestra, and we have 3 beautiful children.  I double-majored in college with a bachelor's in elementary education and reading.  During my initial instruction, I was taught the importance of phonemic awareness, but as a teacher in upper elementary, I did not do much with it.  Until my daughter started preschool and was struggling with reading.  I didn't understand.  She loved books, we read to her all the time, she knew all her letters and the sounds they made, but somehow that wasn't transferring for her into reading easily.  I felt like I was doing everything I knew but it wasn't working.  Once I started teaching in intervention, however, I saw with several students who seemed on paper to have all the prerequisite skills they needed to read, that they lacked phonemic awareness.  They could name all their letters, knew all the sounds, but when asked to say the sounds in the word "pig" would respond with " /p/ /e/ /d/", or something similar.  That's when I realized what was happening.  These students had not spent enough time practicing and listening to sounds in their language before trying to read it, they were missing a pivotal link in the chain.  This is when I became really passionate about informing others about the importance of NOT skipping this step.  It may seem like "killing two birds with one stone" to do the sound awareness and teach the letter at the same time, but you are depriving the child of the opportunity to really just listen to the sounds of the language that you are trying to teach them to read.  

I, my husband, and our three amazing kids!