WINTHROP A LITTLE SUMMER READING
BY MATTHEW STONE
Staff Writer Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel 08/17/2008

WINTHROP -- A poem written on a large sheet of paper sits on an easel in the corner of the Winthrop Grade School library. A small group of students sits in the four chairs facing the board.

"You've got to try to figure out who she's trying to be," Holly Lachance tells the students, instructing them to determine the poet's perspective.

The students are four of the 19 participating in a summer reading program that is new to Winthrop Grade School.

It is the first year, Winthrop Grade School Principal Jeff Ladd said, the school has spread reading instruction over the entire summer for students behind their grade level in reading ability.

It is also the first time intensive instruction has been geared to small groups of students primarily in the first and second grades. It also requires sustained parental involvement.

"This is really an opportunity for them to move forward," Ladd said.

Two mornings each week, the 19 students arrive at the school in four different shifts. They spend much of the session working in groups no larger than three students each.

The program represents a departure from the school's past summer instruction model, which focused on preventing students from backtracking on any progress they had made during the school year.

"It used to be a maintenance program," said Lachance, the grade school's literacy coordinator. "We're trying to make it into an acceleration program."

The grade-school instructors are attempting to avoid the negative stigma attached to summer school. They call the program the Summer Teaching and Reading, or STAR, program.

On Thursday morning, Lachance sat at a table with three 7-year-old girls participating in the program. They took turns reading from a picture book.

Lachance introduced a casual competition when the girls finished the book.

"When I say 'go,' you're going to find and frame two words stuck together," Lachance told the girls, instructing them to put their thumbs around the designated word. "When I say 'go,' you're going to find the mark that says, 'I'm a question.'"

The literacy program, whose model is partially based on research by the National Center for Summer Learning at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, goes beyond asking students to sound words out, Lachance said.

"Reading instruction can't be done without the phonics," she said, "but it can't be its entirety."

The ultimate objective, she said, is to foster students' understanding of what they read and to immerse them in reading.

Poems, colorful vocabulary posters and an Olympics 2008 chart with sporting-event names written along the rings fill the corner walls of the Winthrop Grade School library.

Ladd said he hopes the program supports his goal of having every student enter third grade with a firm literacy foundation.

"We're really pulling back to that first- and second-grade level as our primary intervention years," he said.

Students' parents say they are noticing their children advancing in their reading abilities during the summer months, when students can often forget skills they have developed during the academic year. Lachance asks the participating parents to read with their children each day.

Michelle Carter said her daughter Charlotte, 7, who will begin second grade in the fall, has become used to a nightly reading routine.

"She'll go pick out three books and jump in the bed," she said. "It's the same thing every night, especially during the school year."

Doug Wilbert, whose twin 7-year-old daughters Baylie and Makayla are program participants, said he has seen the girls' interest in reading grow during the summer months.

"They read the newspaper," he said. "They've been reading up on the Olympics."

Matthew Stone -- 623-3811, Ext. 435

mstone@centralmaine.com

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