class act Best practices in action
Best practices in action
Best practices in action
To identify students who need reading support, the entire student body is tested, according to Kristi Forshee, program director and the lab’s main teacher. Once students are in the lab, which is also staffed with four paraprofessionals, they are separated according to their needs into groups, ideally made up of four or fewer students each.
For kindergarten through second grade, there is a focus on the Orton-Gillingham approach. “We’re working a lot on the sounds that the letters make, the sounds that combinations of letters make, spelling rules and we do a lot of hands-on movement,” Forshee said. “We’ve got cards that the kids are moving and then they blend the letters together. We do a lot of white board work where one of us will say a sound and they’ll write all the ways to spell that sound. We’ll use sand trays where kids will write the words that we’re working on so they can feel it.”
The lab also uses decodable e-books. For example, if a group is focused on the letters “th” and the sound they make, students will go through a book and look for all words with “th,” read them in isolation, read the entire book and do some comprehension work.
While reading lab students spend their 30 minutes immersed in hands-on instruction each day, their peers also switch classrooms. Each grade-level spends that half-hour getting help for their personalized needs. Resource Specialist Program students will meet with an RSP teacher while others spend time on comprehension, fluency or another reading-related skill.
“The students who come to us don’t actually miss any core curriculum and aren’t singled out. That’s what we’ve found to be really successful,” Forshee said. “There’s no stigma about having to go to reading lab because everybody is moving classes.”
Roughly 30 years ago, Webster campus leaders noticed a gap in learning among students in the mainstream classroom and set out to fix it. “[They] noticed that there were students struggling with reading and the mainstream classroom wasn’t meeting their needs, but they were also not qualifying for special education services. They were in a lost zone in the middle. So, they really wanted to start this program to meet those students,” Forshee said.
Shortly after the reading lab launched, they observed improvements in student performance that have continued to the present day.
Even during the pandemic where distance learning was in-place, the lab’s benefits were evident. “We were virtual until April 2021 and we even noticed that doing things virtually, we had students make from a couple of months of growth to three years of growth in reading level,” Forshee said. “What I love the most beyond their ability to read increasing is that their confidence and their attitude toward reading and school changes completely.”
The program has expanded to the district’s two other elementary schools as well. With an increasing interest in early literacy statewide, Forshee said the reading lab model is one that other local educational agencies can duplicate if they are committed to doing the work.
Also important is support from administrative leaders and the board. “Reading is the baseline to all education. If a person can’t read, it makes it much more difficult to learn, so early intervention with reading programs in the elementary schools is key,” said Golden Valley USD board President Andy Wheeler. “The more we do that, the easier it is for them to learn everything from history to science to math. We spend so much time addressing how we teach each individual student that sometimes we have to realize that these pull-out type of programs are key.”