Karen Kimball

Reading Teacher

Cobb County Adult Education Center
240 Barber Road
Marietta, GA 30060

School Phone: 678-594-8011
Email: karen.kimball@cobbk12.org

Karen Kimball has been a teacher of beginning reading at the Cobb County Adult Education Center in Marietta, GA, for 10 years. Originally trained as a high school teacher of French and English, Karen began her career in the field of reading in 1996 when she was hired by The Schenck School in Atlanta. There she received her professional training in the Orton-Gillingham Approach and taught students with dyslexia for 7 years. It was through her involvement with Schenck’s Adult Dyslexic Program that Karen discovered her passion for teaching adults to read.

She began her first year at Cobb Adult Ed. as a volunteer in the beginning reading class to teach students “alphabetics” or phonemic awareness, phonics, and word analysis. This volunteer program evolved into a separate class that is best described as a “reading intervention class” for students who have not previously acquired the fundamental skills needed to be confident readers.

The curriculum of this reading intervention class includes direct instruction in:

Phonemic Awareness – recognition of the sounds within spoken words

Phonics – the study of the alphabetic system where letters represent the sounds of spoken language. The phonics component of the program includes the skills of: decoding, spelling, recognizing 6 kinds of syllables, dividing long words into syllables, recognizing non-phonetic words, recognizing morphemes (prefixes, roots, suffixes)

Fluency
Comprehension Strategies
Vocabulary
Written Expression