A pilot program introduced last fall at Georgia Writers Museum (GWM) was such a success it returned last November.
For five weeks leading into the winter holidays, GWM and non-profit Next Generation Therapy worked with local first- and second-grade students to improve reading and writing skills.
A team of community volunteers met one-on-two with students to focus on their specific reading needs.
Personalized attention, paired with a reading curriculum paced for each individual, has already proved positive on students’ reading assessments. Following the winter break, students were excited to return to GWM for reading instruction.
“That’s the most I’ve ever read!” exclaimed one student as he finished reading his Decodable Reader, a short book designed for students to independently read engaging stories. Decodable Readers are carefully matched with target skills, so students never encounter a word they haven’t already been taught to comprehend.
“This confidence empowers them to keep going, and to want to read the next Reader,” speech-language pathologist Lorie Delk explained.
Delk was the founder in 1995 of Next Generation Therapy (NGT), a non-profit organization that helps children develop communication skills to better succeed in life through pediatric speech, language, and reading services.
NGT provides the early literacy program Up-Words Reading, used at Georgia Writers Museum. This program has four levels, ranging from first-time readers who are just learning the alphabet and its sounds, to more advanced readers who are starting to explore expressive writing and chapter books. At the heart of the program, it provides students with the tools they need to sound out words, decode multi-syllable words, and practice and understand rules such as “magic e,” which transforms short vowel sounds into long vowel sounds — such as with “hop” and “hope.”
Volunteer tutors follow a scripted lesson plan for each week’s session.
“While the program was written by an expert in speech-language pathology, you do not need to be one to volunteer,” former school psychologist and current GWM Education Committee Chair Janet Kelhoffer said. “Instruction is well written and consistent. Volunteers are provided a teacher’s guide that matches the students’ workbooks.
We’ve had volunteers who have never taught in the classroom jump in and teach these reading lessons with no problem.
It speaks highly of the program and the volunteers,” Kelhoffer said.
Tutoring will continue through the Spring semester. Students’ assessments will be evaluated, and if they continue to excel, plans for future reading instruction will be assessed.
“We are eager to help students learn to read,” GWM Executive Director Melissa Swindell said.
“Eatonton has such a rich history of writers, like Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker, and Joel Chandler Harris, who recorded the Brer Rabbit folktales. Who knows which students we’ll inspire next? Maybe they just need a little help getting started.”
- Contributed