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New reading room to keep Canfield schools on top
By ROBERT CONNELLY
CANFIELD
The only school district in Mahoning County to receive an “A” on its state report card is eyeing to be a top-10 district by 2017.
To do that, Canfield Local Schools has added guided reading rooms in both elementary buildings, C.H. Campbell and Hilltop, for teachers and eventually students to use to improve their reading skills.
“Most top districts in Ohio are having” these rooms, C.H. Campbell principal Travis Lavery said. “We’re already top in the tri-county area — it’s just a matter of expanding that further.”
Wednesday was the first day for teachers in the elementary schools to get a look at each building’s guided reading room. At C.H. Campbell, it was an unused classroom that has books in various types of bins and baskets based on reading level and in groups of six to eight for that size reading group or individual books for independent reading. Hilltop principal Joe Maroni said his building’s room is a bit smaller, but comparable in the number of books and setup.
A few teachers at a time walked into the room to talk with district literacy coach Carol Young to ask questions and see how the system works. There were many times a teacher and Young would talk about how they can tweak their teaching curriculum to utilize the room once a district-wide initiative begins the week of Oct. 6 for every classroom to implement a guided reading course.
District officials explained it cost about $90,000 to set up the rooms, including moving tables and cabinets and shelving around. Of that $90,000, the district applied for and received a $75,000 grant through a state Early Literacy and Reading Readiness Competitive grant.
Young explained that through the new room and array of books, teachers can find books to teach specific elements of Common Core, the new state standard for schools. “It’s teaching children in small groups with books they are able to read so they can understand them. It’s the best way to differentiate structure and reading,” Young said of guided reading.
The room also supports the district’s Leveled Literacy Intervention, or LLI, which is an intervention program to help students struggling to read at their current grade level. That is “really about teaching kids to read and learn at grade level,” Young said.
Lavery and Maroni both hired new kindergarten teachers last year who had previously worked with guided reading in their career. For those teachers, “they can support the teachers who are new to it,” Lavery said.
Two of those teachers are at Hilltop and spoke about guided reading. “A lot of the strategies we use in guided reading are concepts that we use and just grouping students together by ability” is new, Hilltop kindergarten teacher Meghan Manning said. “A lot of teachers have been doing this for years.”
Young and the teachers in the district have yet to settle on an exact time frame for how long a section of books can be checked out for, but talked this week about allowing them to be checked out for two to three weeks. Both Manning and Mackenzie Thomas liked that approach. “I think that’s probably a good amount of time,” Manning said.
She explained that first week can be getting to know the story, that second week a focus on the vocabulary, and the final week would be on testing and analyzing what was learned. Thomas said, “The key of guided reading is to apply strategies to use the first week and then build them up over the weeks ... [students become] more confident and comfortable with their reading.”