Reading Initiative covers entire state

From the Huntsville (AL) Times

This year, every public school in Alabama with grades K-3 will be teaching the Alabama Reading Initiative way.

That means teachers sitting with small groups of children each day, reading and being read to for 90 minutes. Kids who are struggling will get another 30 minutes, perhaps with some additional help from the school's reading coach.

And reading is incorporated into every lesson of the day. You can't do a math problem without being able to read the instructions, for instance.

Federal education dollars are paying for Alabama to take the initiative statewide, and hundreds of teachers attended Alabama Reading Academy sites this summer, including one at Whitesburg Elementary School.

"After this summer training, we will have a total of 902 Alabama Reading Initiative schools across the state," said Christine Spear, the state Department of Education's information specialist for ARI.

ARI calls for staff commitment, professional training for teachers, materials on different reading levels and data analysis to determine the reading skills of individual students using standardized tests.

A few weeks ago at Whitesburg Elementary, Deloris Cable was sitting at a table with three small faces watching her as she read "The Dinosaur's New Clothes," a retelling of the old fairy tale about a vain emperor.

Reading with great emphasis and drama, Cable, who teaches kindergarten at Jones Valley Elementary, read the book as Celina Hardin sat by. Hardin is the reading coach at Mt. Carmel Elementary School and was training kindergarten teachers in ARI principles.

Cable closed the book to a chorus of "can we read it again?"

They would read it again later, Cable said, moving on to the vocabulary words they were going to study from the book: anxious, enormous and magnificent.

"Nyvia, I noticed you have your ears pierced," Cable said. "Were you anxious when you got your ears pierced"? That launched a discussion of the word, which Cable and Hardin proceeded to use in several examples.

That's one of the strategies of ARI, said Lora Snell, the reading coach at Mt. Carmel. She was in training this summer to be an academy coach to teach other teachers. With ARI, teachers bring up reading throughout the day, emphasizing vocabulary words in a context the children can understand and supporting those who need help. While teachers work with the struggling readers, the students who are reading on grade level work on projects and worksheets that reinforce what they're learning.

In many ways, ARI just reinforces many teachers' instincts on how to teach, that using repetition and working with small groups works best, said Vickie Ryan, the reading specialist for Madison County Schools, one of the first systems in the state to embrace the program. All but two system schools, Sparkman and Hazel Green high schools, have ARI programs in place.

ARI is a "cultural shift in the thinking of schools," Ryan said. "Teachers have become diagnosticians" who target students who need help reading on grade level. That's the goal of ARI, she said, 100 percent literacy.

"It puts the focus on the individual student," said Stewart Thorson, the assistant principal at Jones Valley Elementary and a participant in the reading academy this summer.

"Before, we made a lot of assumptions that every child was getting it," he said.

ARI is an adjustment for many teachers, but "I don't think it's a difficult thing," said Snell, who is starting her sixth year as a reading coach.

The ultimate goal, Snell said, is to find "the most effective way to reach kids."

The original article can be found  HERE