Barnum School (Bridgeport)
The focus of Barnum Elementary School’s SIG is improving literacy. Students have made improvements in both reading comprehensive and reading fluency this year. On average, Barnum sixth graders improved 67% on a timed assessment of reading comprehension from September 2011 to January 2012, going from 15 correct responses in a 3-minute time frame to 25 correct responses. Sixth graders also improved 19% in word fluency, increasing the number of words read correctly per minute from 105 in September 2011 to 125 in January 2012.
This month Barnum School’s cadres have been focused on Reading in grades K–3 and those teachers have identified a need for more very specific professional development in their new Mondo curriculum. The teachers have been very pleased with this targeted support. The Reading Cadre for grades 4–8 are not only getting personal weekly and bi-monthly onsite training of the School-wide Enrichment Model-Reading program (SEM-R), this cadre is also looking into a unified student vocabulary instructional program to use with all students.
The Kindergarten is utilizing Dr. Coyne’s model of Early Vocabulary Intervention with all students and additional support for at risk students. All kindergarten teachers and para-professionals were trained this fall by Dr. Coyne himself and given all the needed vocabulary materials. Dr. Coyne’s team, along with the Language Arts cadre will continue to collect Progress Data. The 1st grade students that are below benchmark in reading are benefitting from Reading Recovery a literacy intervention.
The Parent Engagement cadre is looking forward to going to the School-Family-Community Partnerships conference in Cromwell in May, and attending the CommPACT Parent Engagement Network Meeting on April 4th at the Storrs UConn campus.
Barnum has also partnered again with Sacred Heart University. This time the support comes in the name of SHUE-LACES where college students are coming in and supporting our physical Education Teachers a few times a month as part of their Service Learning.