3rd-grade readers show promise with full-court SPARK approach

Alan Borsuk:

A woman who was part of a group I spoke to one evening last week in Fox Point said she volunteered to tutor high school students in Milwaukee who were struggling with reading. It went badly. The teens were far below grade level. They were not interested in school, not interested in reading, not interested -- period.

Contrast that with what I saw one morning recently at Engleburg School, a Milwaukee Public Schools elementary at 5100 N. 91st St. A classroom has been set aside for the SPARK Early Literacy Program of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee, a project aimed at getting more kids on track as readers early on.

About 45 first- and second-graders at Engleburg are participating this fall. Two or three times a week, each spends a half-hour in the SPARK room, working one-on-one with tutors, many of them trained college students working under the federally funded Americorps program.

Little kid and big kid, almost shoulder to shoulder, with the big kid following a very specific program for what to do minute by minute. And behind that, collaboration between classroom teachers and SPARK staff to build up results. And behind that, mountains of research that shows that kids who do not get a good start on reading by third grade are much more likely to have poor long-term outcomes, both in school and beyond.

But -- and this is important -- the in-school work is just one of three parts of SPARK. The students are also involved in after-school reading sessions several times a week. And SPARK works with the families of the students, including making home visits, to coach parents and involve them in helping their kids become good readers. That includes providing books they can own and read together at home.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at November 25, 2013 12:10 AM
Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom: Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas