Castle Heights sees gains with new reading program

By CARBON SCHOOL DISTRICT

    Busy.
    That’s the word that best describes what’s going on at Castle Heights Elementary these days.
    And that word goes beyond just all the fun things going on with the school.
    “We are getting down to the second half of the year and this is the time when we start our push to finish teaching all the curriculum,” said Chris Winfree, principal at Castle Heights Elementary. “We still have a ways to go and we’ll be teaching that until the end of April.”
    Winfree said that this year’s emphasis in the school has been on reading, and that that skill is a big part of the school improvement plan.
    “Teachers are working hard using the Wonders program,” he said. “We are seeing a lot of really good gains in language arts and reading.”
    Winfree said the emphasis is on students being able to read at their grade level when they leave so they will proceed to the next year prepared to take on new challenges.
    While that has always been the goal of schools, it hasn’t always worked out that way. The old reading program used by the district was just a shadow of itself and had been added to in bits and pieces through the years to make it effective.
    However, it was not consistent enough to guarantee that teachers and administrators knew where each student in a school stood when it came to their reading ability.
    “As we go through the data from Wonders and other assessments that we give, we look for holes in students’ abilities, whether it be phonics, fluency, rate, or many other specific areas of reading,” he explained.
    Because of that the staff uses targeted interventions that concentrate on specific problems students might be having.
    For instance at the end of the year kindergarten students should be at a D level. These books are available to students on everything from a computer to a Chromebook to an iPad. Winfree said they have leveled every student in the school and know where they are at in terms of skills at any one time. And then students are put into a program where the goal is to just let them read.
    “We want students reading books at their level, regardless of where that is,” he said. “That way they can read and read and become more fluent.”
    They can pick from many different genres of books from fantasy to mystery, just so they are reading what they like. Consequently, it is has become more fun for them to read. It also allows teachers the opportunity to work with them in different ways and use strategies to help them to grow.
    “The more they read, the better they get, and the less mistakes they make,” he said. “When we get to the point where they are making three or fewer mistakes per page, we know they have mastered that level and then they level up.”
    Winfree said they have been using this program with some of the upper grades and they have seen some tremendous gains.        Some students have raised their skills three or four reading levels in a period of two months.         He said that the biggest gains are coming from students who had some of the lowest reading levels.
    “The long term focus of this program as we use it and our regular interventions is that we intend on having no student leave a grade level who aren’t ready for the next year,” he said. “This compliments the superintendents program of getting more leveled reading programs into our schools.”
    Winfree said while their library in the school has a large number of books, they are not leveled and so often students will want to read what is popular with other kids and find they have a hard time reading and understanding the material.
    That can be a negative for a student because of the frustration. The RAZ program helps to bring them books they are interested in, while not over taxing their abilities.  He said the trend in education at one point was to push students to read more complicated material than they were really prepared for with the idea that would push them forward. This program, obviously, works in a very different way.
    “What this does is that it transitions students into being able to read materials that apply to the curriculum we are teaching,” he explained. “All this is very teacher intensive too.”
    He also said that besides being able to help students who struggle with reading by pushing them through materials they like to read, it also does not hold back students who are above their grade level.
    This way of doing things has also been helped out by the Professional Learning Community (PLC) process the district has adopted, both horizontally and vertically.
    “The process of collaboration between teachers in a grade level plays a huge role in this,” said Winfree.
    Winfree said that as those essential standards are put together they are going to be put on large posters so that students can see what they need to be able to do when they get ready to move to the next grade level.
    “We also want parents to know what their children should know in terms of skills to move on,” he said. “The poster will help with that.”
    The school has done a lot of reading activities to improve reading and to make it fun. For instance they had athletes from USU Eastern come and read to the kids at one point this year. And on February 21 they had a Pop Tarts and Police Open Library reading activity, where peace officers from various agencies came to the school and spent some time before school reading to individuals and groups of kids.
    The school also recently had an inspirational speaker named Ryan Stream who is not only a great speaker with the stories he tells about his life in which he faced homelessness and abuse, but also is an outstanding musician as well as a veteran. The students loved Streams story and the excitement in the gymnasium when he spoke was electric.