By Jennifer Fernandez
CONCORD, N.C. — In Meagan Beam’s dining room, a dozen 3D printers whir and clack away as they crank out plastic tiles with colorful raised letters, letter combinations and pictures on them.
The tiles are part of a system the former teacher created as a way to teach reading to students, especially those who struggle to make sense of letters and words.
“I was teaching my third graders how to change the ‘y’ to ‘i,’ and they were really struggling with it,” Beam said recently from her home. “And I was like, I need just something where I can give them a word and they can take the ‘y’ off the end of the word and toss it, and then they can add the ‘i’ and then the suffix.”
She scoured education supply websites to find something that would help, but she didn’t see anything that met her needs.
Beam decided to create something herself. She found some PVC pipe and couplings at Lowe’s Home Improvement. She used a marker to write the first part of the word on the pipe and the “y” on the coupling. That way, students could take the coupling with the “y” off and add the “i” and the “es.”
“They loved it,” she said.
Fellow teachers did too. They asked her to make sets for their classrooms.
Like most inventors, Beam fine-tuned her product, partly because she was tired of cutting PVC pipe and partly because it’s not fun chasing round bits of PVC pipe around the classroom after they roll off of a desk.
She found an injection mold company in Gastonia to create triangular plastic pipe pieces that can snap together — and more importantly, lay flat on a student desk. On one of the flat sides, Beam fits letter or picture tiles to create the finished piece — think Scrabble tiles that connect like Lego pieces.
“The more that they’re able to … put it in their hands and experience their learning, it’s so much more valuable,” she said.
Focus on early literacy
Learning to read early is important beyond ensuring that students succeed in school.
In a 2024 article in the journal Frontiers in Pediatrics, researchers noted that reading ability is connected to life-long health. One example: A longitudinal study found that people who read books live almost 23 months longer than those who don’t read books.
The relationship extends to mental health.
“Students who struggle with reading are more likely to have internalized mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression,” the authors wrote.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has encouraged pediatricians since 2014 to promote literacy as part of child health visits from infancy through at least when the child starts school.
Programs such as Reach Out and Read use free books given out at well-child visits as a way to assess where a child is in reaching developmental milestones. For example, grabbing and turning pages shows that a child’s hand muscles are working well.
A June 2023 multi-year study of Reach Out and Read in North Carolina and South Carolina found that caregivers already exposed to the program were more likely to read daily to a child than those who had just joined.
Still, some children will continue to find reading difficult.
Reading struggles
Only three in 10 North Carolina fourth graders tested at or above proficient in the 2024 reading portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The results were not much different from the 2022 national assessment, also known as “The Nation’s Report Card.”
The assessment is based on a representative sample of students who take the test across the country. However, some school districts opt to have more students take the test as part of NAEP’s urban districts program. In North Carolina, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Guilford County school districts take part.
In 2024, the districts’ individual results — with 31 percent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg students and 30 percent of Guilford County students testing at or above proficient — mirrored how students performed statewide.
The struggle to read among U.S. children is apparent much earlier than fourth grade, when the test is administered.
More than 1 in 3 of the nation’s children enter kindergarten lacking the skills needed to learn to read, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Those skills include knowing the alphabet or being able to count to 10.
In North Carolina, about 13 percent of students receive services under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, more commonly known as IDEA. That included 27,448 children ages 5 to 21 with a speech or language disability, according to federal data for the 2023-24 school year.
Also that academic year, 3,777 North Carolina children ages 3 to 5 identified under IDEA with a speech or language disability were enrolled in early childhood programs, data show.
Hands-on learning
Beam, who taught for 16 years and has a master’s in teaching reading, has been certified in the Orton-Gillingham approach to learning. It focuses on “prescriptive, sequential, and multi-sensory lessons aligned with the Science of Reading.”
The approach has become popular among parents and some educators, according to a 2021 meta-analysis of research on Orton-Gillingham published in the Exceptional Children journal.
The study’s authors said that though their research suggested Orton-Gillingham interventions “do not statistically significantly improve foundational skill outcomes or vocabulary and reading comprehension outcomes for students” compared with conventional approaches, there were two caveats.
They found that the approach potentially helps students with severe word-level reading disabilities. They also said there’s not enough high-quality, rigorous research to fully understand the effects of the Orton-Gillingham approach on reading outcomes.
Beam said research is also difficult because there’s a “wide, vast variety of tools” like her OTTER (which stands for “optimizing tactile tools to engage readers”) Reading system that are being used by educators who follow Orton-Gillingham principles.
At its heart, Orton-Gillingham is structured literacy, she said, “which is what we know research supports.”
She’s also seen how students react in her classrooms.
“It gives something that is abstract, as far as letter sounds and letter formations and letter names, and makes it more concrete,” she said. “And (it) helps them identify, ‘OK, this is the letter name. This is the letter sound. I can see its formation.’ And then they can take it and apply it as they read or as they write words.”
It also helps other students with disabilities. For autistic students, she said, that tactile experience can be very useful.
There’s been enough interest that Beam, who is studying for a doctorate in education, recently quit her part-time job to focus solely on OTTER Reading.
Her 3D printers create multiple sets, from the basic alphabet, to capital letters, to syllable division for second and third graders. She has also created sets in Spanish and braille.
“My favorite set is the initial sound matching because of all of the different little images,” she said. A picture of a basketball, for example, can help students with the “b” sound.
She also loves the braille set.
“It’s a super interesting and neat language to me. And then it’s super important to me that I … support all students, regardless of their abilities.”
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