Santa Monica-Malibu School District
Educational Foundation
Academic Enrichment Grant Program
Applicant’s name: Katie Kramer Jaroch
Applicant’s school: Lincoln Middle School
Grade level: 6th, 7th, and 8th
Support for Struggling Readers
In middle school, reading becomes more complex and demanding. The emphasis changes from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” This transition can be difficult for all students, but especially those who read below grade level and are not receiving any special services, e.g. special education or ELL services. Struggling readers are often characterized as lacking certain reading skills, e.g. reading comprehension, word recognition, automaticity, and reading fluency (Moore et al., 1999).
We have two Reading Workshop classes that serve a population of about 20 struggling readers who need literacy support. Currently, these classes focus on reading comprehension strategies. However, Reading Workshop students often have additional difficulties that interfere with comprehension; they struggle with word recognition, fluency, spelling, and automaticity. As of now, we do not have the instructional materials to adequately meet these students’ needs. We could better serve the students if we had more current materials to help support readers who need intensive instruction with reading skills. These materials would help students improve in these areas: fluency, vocabulary, spelling, and automatic word recognition. This grant would fund the materials necessary to implement an improved literacy support program.
Project Budget Request: Amazon materials: $155.96 ($142.54, plus shipping fee of $13.42).
Materials 1-8 to be purchased from amazon.com. #9 to be purchased from greatleaps.com. $110 plus $11 shipping fee.
Grand total: $276.96
Items to be purchased:
1. Words Their Way, Third Edition by Donald R. Bear $34.00
2. Words Their Way: Word Sorts for Syllables and Affixes Spellers by Francine Johnston $16.00
3. Words Their Way: Words Sorts For Derivational Relations Spellers by Francine Johnston $16.00
5. Read-Aloud Anthology: 35 Short, Riveting Read Alouds by Janet Allen $16.99
6. The Vocabulary Teacher's Book of Lists (J-B Ed: Book of Lists) by Edward B. Fry $18.87
7. Tools for Teaching Content Literacy by Janet Allen $18.50
8. QuickReads Level E Book 2 (A Research-Based Fluency Program) by E. Hiebert $11.98
9. Great Leaps Reading Program: Middle School Program package: Instructor manual and student edition $110.00 plus shipping: $121.00
Project Description
a.) Objectives and Goals: The immediate goal of this grant is to have all students in my reading workshop class increase their fluency, word recognition skills, and vocabulary skills as measured by different informal classroom assessments. The broader goal for the grant is for these same students to read at grade level as measured by the CAT-6 test. Students will be able to recognize words in isolation and in context. They will also improve their fluency (rate, intonation, etc.) and their vocabulary and spelling skills. The students will be able to generalize this knowledge across the core content areas, thus improving their reading skills and achievement in science and social studies.
b.) Number of Students/Grade Level Impacted: 25 6th, 7th, and 8th graders.
c.) Project Methods +/or Activities: These materials would provide instructional guides and activities for students’ practice in word recognition, vocabulary, spelling, and fluency. This grant would also pay for several books for teacher development, containing research-based methods for teaching literacy to struggling readers in middle school. Also included are some high interest read aloud books to increase motivation and form a basis for learning words in context.
Project Evaluation
All Reading Workshop students will
· improve their fluency, based on timed assessments in Quick Reads and their rate/fluency scores on the Qualitative Reading Inventory (QRI).
· increase their word bank of automatically recognized words, as evidenced by their scores on informal assessments in Words Their Way and their automatic recognition scores on the QRI word lists.
· increase their word bank of vocabulary words, as evidenced by their scores on pre- and post- test scores from the Book of Lists.
· improve their spelling skills, as evidenced by pre- and post-instruction assessments from Words Their Way.
· Improve their scores on the CAT-6 Language Arts test
Project Timeline
These materials will be used the first week of school in September until the end of school in June. Pretests and diagnostic assessments will be administered during the first week of school. Informal assessments of fluency, vocabulary, automatic word recognition, and spelling will be conducted in November, January, April, and June. Informal assessments using the Qualitative Reading Inventory, 4th ed., will also be used to monitor student progress and will be conducted in September, January, and May.