Summers are for reading (programs)

By Cindy Landrum  

JULY 7, 2011 12:51 p.m. (0)

But many elementary school teachers are required to take just one class in how to teach reading, putting them at a disadvantage when it comes to teaching the struggling readers who need the instruction the most.

And, to top it off, many struggling readers have little or no access to books on their reading level in subjects in which they are interested.

It’s a major problem with major consequences. A study released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation showed students who don’t read proficiently by third grade are four times less likely to graduate from high school. If those struggling readers are poor, they are 13 times likelier to be high school dropouts.

Schools and nonprofit groups throughout the Upstate are trying to combat the problems in a variety of ways.

Earlier this year, Hub City Writers Project and 20 other local organizations formed Great Kids Deserve Great Books to collect at least 3,000 new or gently used children’s and young adult books to redistribute to Carver Junior High School, Cleveland Elementary and Houston Elementary for summer reading.

Public Education Partners of Greenville County is starting the Greenville Reading Partnership, a program designed to strengthen elementary school teachers’ ability to teach reading more effectively.

Sterling School in Greenville is opening its library to students and their parents periodically over the summer and is conducting a reading bingo-like card game where students are asked to invent a different ending for a book they’ve read, to compare a summer movie to the book on which it is based and to act out a story from a book.

At the Spartanburg Terrace Tenants Association, the Raising a Reader program allows children up to five years old to pick out four books a week from its library. “We want them to enjoy books like they enjoy their favorite toy,” said Krystal Parker, program director, who said some students have improved their reading levels by several grades through the program.

A child who reads as few as six books over the summer can maintain reading skills, said renowned reaching researcher Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee.

Not reading can cause a summer slide that puts lower-income students at a significantly greater risk. Children who don’t read during the summer can lose as much as three months of their reading skills from June until September.

Allington’s research showed spending roughly $40 to $50 a year on free books for each child began to alleviate the achievement gap in the summer.

“Children growing up in homes with many books get three years more schooling than children from bookless homes, independent of their parents’ education, occupation and class,” Allington wrote in “Family Scholarly Culture and Educational Success.”

But it needs to be the right book, Allington said. Kids who don’t read well won’t likely pick up a book voluntarily unless it matches their skill level and their interest, said Susan Shi, program director of the Public Education Partners reading imitative.

“The issue is putting into a child’s hand a book he can be successful reading, but that includes two or three challenges purposefully,” she said.

Through the initiative, Public Education Partners will buy books for each Monaview Elementary student to build their own home library.

In addition, the program will buy books to increase the school’s classroom libraries so each child in grades kindergarten through fifth will have access to as many as five titles at the appropriate reading level to read per day.

Teachers at Monaview and nine other schools will receive training this summer to teach struggling readers with “guided reading” instruction, Shi said. Teachers at Monaview will receive an additional three days training in the spring.

“It’s important for teachers and administrators to know what good teaching of reading looks like,” she said. “There seems to be a consensus among elementary school teachers that the typical reading training they receive while preparing to teach elementary school just really isn’t enough.”

Through that training, teachers will learn to diagnose a child’s reading level and how to identify the best book to put in the child’s hands for instruction today, Shi said.

At Monaview Elementary, 38.3 percent of students read below grade level.

“Without an emphasis on effective reading instruction provided by the classroom teacher, the likelihood is that these students’ reading scores will not improve,” Shi said.

The goal of Greenville Reading Partners is to increase by 15 percent the number of students reading on grade level by the end of the third grade over a three-year period.

The program could be replicated at other high-poverty, high-need elementary schools.

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