If students returning to the Secaucus public elementary schools on Sept. 3 think nothing has changed, they will be surprised to find some innovative programs waiting for them.
In late June and during the summer, teachers and administrators were hard at work shaping changes to programs that could start up the moment kids walk through the doors.
Perhaps the biggest change kids will face will be in the newly established reading program that will be instituted at both the Huber Street and Clarendon schools.
“We’re very excited about this,” said Nancy Cashinelli, who along with Irene Dewland serves as a reading specialist in the elementary schools.
The two schools will be instituting the Scott Foresman Reading series from kindergarten to fifth grade.
This program, Dewland said, gets away from the literature-based reading program of the past and focuses on the five essential components of reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension. The program, in fact, is designed to meet some of the criteria put into place under President George W. Bush’s “No child left behind” program.
Because reading is a critical skill, the President has also proposed that states administer reading assessments to all students in grades 3 through 8. The tests will enable parents and teachers to diagnose children who are at risk of falling behind in reading, and get them the help when it can be most helpful.
Cashinelli said the program provides ways of inspiring kids as early as kindergarten, using a variety of tools.
“We’re regrouping in the classroom and getting away from the whole language approach,” said Dewland. “Students will be broken up into ability groups along their level of reading.”
Whole language was a movement that swept through the United States during last several decades in which students learned to recognize words in context as part of some natural process. But this program and others revert to earlier methods of reading education that use a structured and protracted process that gives students and understanding of sound and symbols. The ability to use phonics and to sound words out becomes one of the central keys learning to reach and comprehend the text.
“In class, materials will be available for slower learners and those who are more advanced,” Dewland said.
Cashinelli and Dewland looked over materials from various education programs and showed these to teachers. In a narrowing-down process, they came up with this program. At the end of the last school year, one teacher in each school conducted a month and half pilot program to test the methods in actual classroom conditions.
“All the teachers who looked over the materials like the program,” Dewland said.
Teachers took a seminar on the new program in June and another training session workshop over the summer.
The idea behind the change is to teach kids the fundamentals of reading during the early grades so that by the sixth grade they can apply what they learned in a literature-based program.
This literature based program will be taught in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades. It is one of the school district’s transitional courses, part of a three-year program that will continue in the seventh and eighth grades and allow kids to ease comfortably out of elementary school and into middle school programs.
New web pages for teachers
During the week before school opens, many elementary teachers attended a special seminar in the Secaucus Public Library and Business Resource Center to set up web pages. This had several aspects, said technology teacher Al Kuchar.
Teachers were working to set up their own e-mail accounts, and web pages that would assign homework and provide students with lessons and educational resources outside school hours.
The two-day workshop was designed to allow teachers to familiarize themselves with web tools so that they could make their own web pages.
Kuchar and Michelle Martinelli took teachers through the fine points of software that will allow them to set up links and put assignments onto the web for students and parents to access.
“Students and parents can access the site and see exactly what their assignments are,” Kuchar said. “The teachers can even install links to sites where students can get the information they need for an assignment.”
Because the schools are currently being readied for classes that start on Sept. 3, the teachers used the computer lab at Secaucus library.
“I think this is great,” said Library Director Katherine Steffens. “The teachers helped us set up these computers and now we get reciprocate by allowing them to come here for this.”
Possible new report cards
Meanwhile, a handful of teachers in Clarendon School have been working on setting up a new kind of report card. This is something that still needs the approval of the Board of Education – before whom the teachers are expected to make a presentation over the next month or so.
“What we’re trying to do is make the report cards grade appropriate,” said Mary Tighe, one of the seven teachers working on the project.
Under this proposal, students in different grades would get different report cards with a different grading system.
Elementary school is generally divided into two parts, kindergarten through third and then intermediary grades four through six. The report card would have a coded system for kindergarten and first grade that would give parents a better idea of progress. While students in the other grades would still see the traditional letter markings of typical report cards, the letter grades in second and third grades would reflect knowledge of basic skills, while in the fourth to sixth grades, these marks would indicate how effectively these skills are being used.
“We’re hope that with board approval we can have the new system in place for first marking period ending in November,” Tighe said.