Our District

Superintendent's Message

Strong Beginnings Make For a Lasting Life Influence

During the past several months, as daily reports of worsening financial conditions saturate the air we breathe, I started to think about how financial cycles like this impact our children’s educational experience. The very real, very obvious ramifications of a severe financial downturn, housing, employment, and health care, seem to supersede the issue of quality school instruction. Reductions in state aid to school districts, while counterproductive and damaging in the long-term, pale in comparison to the individual family crises brought about by job loss, home foreclosure and loss of health insurance.

This financial crisis has made me think about how parents and educators can re-assess the academic and social development of children in an era of reduced resources. We know that the formative years of life are the time to invest heavily in the foundation of a child’s learning platform, both in terms of what parents do for their children and what our schools offer in the classroom. ‘Strong beginnings’ make a profound difference in the way in which an individual learner develops cognitively, socially, and as a lifelong learner. Recent research in these areas has led to a profound change in the way in which instruction is approached in the primary grades. In the past, many saw kindergarten as a transitional year between home and school. The advent of private and public early childhood education, the greater awareness of parents, and broader research into learning development changed this thinking because professionals and non-professionals recognized the extraordinary learning capacity of toddlers, notably in the area of language development. Clear linkages were documented between early development, instruction and age-related advances. Children now enter kindergarten with a broad range of experiences and competencies that most kindergarteners did not have in years past. What this means, plainly speaking, is that most people are surprised at the depth and breadth of learning in the kindergarten and first grade classrooms of today. These are a few sample activities in the kindergarten and first grades of our district.

• Students learn how to sort data to create bar or pictographs. They use the data to verbalize and write “greater-than” and “less-than” number sentences, as well as vertical and horizontal math sentences.

• In Fundations, an early childhood reading strategy, primary students learn the letters, their sounds and formation. In Writers Workshop, children learn that ideas for writing can come from books they read and they create their own books. Students are learning that label books have pictures that match the words on each page. They are putting finger spaces between words and are able to read back what they have written.

• In Reading Workshop, students are learning about “schema”. They know that schema is information that is stored in their brain and that schema is everything they know or may have experienced. This allows them to make connections to stories they hear or read. They are also beginning to learn how to approximate reading by hearing “old favorites”. They hear these stories over and over again and use strategies, such as memory to retell the story. This work, based upon the research completed by Elizabeth Sulzby, a national literacy expert, enables children to ‘approximate’ the reading, which results in children becoming early readers.

Practical applications are, as always, the foundation of classroom reinforcement. All students will celebrate the 100th day of school with their classes counting the number of days they have been in school. Children will participate in special academic activities to support the concept of “100”. The concept of 100 as 10 groups of 10 and the concept of 10 as 10 ones is reinforced throughout the year during morning meetings and math.

By the time students have completed kindergarten, their skills and learning strategies have greatly expanded. Teachers in first grade build upon this by focusing students on thinking and talking about books. Literacy units emphasize comprehension. Reading partners make connections to texts, learn about story elements, and learn how to monitor their comprehension as they read. Writers create “small moments” stories which have helped them find the details in their stories; a key element of comprehension.

Another aspect of comprehension is self-editing, or revision. In revision the goal is for the students to understand that they have an audience; therefore their writing should be clear and understandable, and thus the focus on the mechanics of writing for others, not just oneself, is emphasized.

Other instructional disciplines also demonstrate our ability to challenge students beyond rote learning methods. In math, students are telling and solving number story problems and analyzing relationships between known and unknown numbers. Working on story problems demonstrates to them how to apply their addition and subtraction skills to real-world situations. Social Studies instruction emphasizes the differences between traditions and holidays, demonstrating again the depth of learning that now takes place for our youngest students.

These research based instructional strategies provide young children with strong beginnings that influence the rest of their life. At every stage, these efforts in the formative years pay dividends as students grow and develop. We share this work with parents who as their children’s primary educators and who set strong examples through participation in “read-ins”, “RIF”, Reading is Fundamental,” and “PARP”, parents as reading partners; the latter two which are PTO sponsored events that support early literacy and a love of reading. It is the work of our staff and parents that provide an enriched learning environment for our students. My thoughts now are about ways to nurture and expand these practices even in times of financial crisis.

Sincerely,
Harriet Copel, Ed.D.
Superintendent of Schools