Howard students practice phonemic awareness through classroom 'room transformations'

An Alamo Heights ISD presenter and Howard teacher Erin Heinzey described a classroom technique called a “room transformation” that turns a learning space into a themed environment to engage students and target specific skills. "There is certainly much to love about Alamo Heights ISD. What I'm most proud of is our continued focus on the profile of a learner, and we're here at Howard today to to focus on the 1 tenet that is about thinking creatively and critically," the unidentified presenter said.

"So a room transformation is you change your environment to be something completely new. So instead of walking into a classroom, you might be walking into a hospital. Or today, we walked into the world at Candyland, and it instantly boosts engagement in your classroom," Erin Heinzey said, describing how teachers use a theme to target learning goals. For the Candyland transformation, Heinzey said the class practiced phonemic awareness: isolating beginning, middle and end sounds in words to support reading and writing development. During the recorded visit, she prompted students with examples such as identifying the first sound in the word "pit."

Heinzey said she introduced room transformations after joining Howard six years ago and gradually expanded the practice across the campus with colleagues. "We do lots of different ones like number surgery, we've done dinosaurs and so many more. And then slowly, the whole campus has started doing them. So this year, our whole campus participated," she said.

The recorded segment shows the technique used with Howard's youngest learners to make practice tasks more interactive and theme-driven. The presentation included brief classroom exchanges between the presenter, Heinzey and students that demonstrated the focus on phonemic tasks and immediate student engagement.

No formal board action, policy change or funding amount was discussed during the recorded visit. The segment presented classroom practice and teacher experience rather than a district policy decision or budgetary item.