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At the Johnson School in Charlottesville, Virginia, you've got to run pretty fast to
keep up with the Instructional Coordinator, Dr. Sharon Walpole.
Okay, so do I need to get an intervention going?
She directs the school's home-grown reading program called RISE: Reading Initiative for
Student Excellence.
How are you, Shawna? You going to have a good day?
Every morning, kids regroup across grade levels for 90 minute of reading instruction.
"Please dismiss all students to RISE."
Teachers can focus on a narrow range of skills because groups are based on reading achievement.
These kids are about to find out that spelling makes sense.
Our spelling system is regular. It's not a mystery, it's a regular system with some exceptions.
Miss Gorman's not going to be giving children the message that spelling's just hard and
you have to memorize it. That's not what spelling instruction at Johnson School is like and
I don't think that's what sensible spelling instruction's like anywhere.
Okay, so today for Word Study we're going to be talking about what we've been talking
about all week. We're talking about action words.
Second- and third-grade teacher Madeline Gorman guides Word Study-the explicit and active
exploration of words' features. Rather than memorizing rules, students are discovering
spelling patterns.
And we're going to talk about how we add the "ing" to the verb so we can use it in the
past, and in the present and in the future.
Ms. Gorman works with the i-n-g ending because most of her students are starting to spell
multisyllabic words.
Okay, so we're going to take a look at a couple of examples together. I'm going to get you
guys to help me read the words and we'll figure out if it's a double, drop, or nothing. Okay,
so how about this one? Raise your hand if you can read this. Shinelle?
Shaking.
Shaking. Double, drop or nothing?
E-drop.
Shake. Good job, E-drop. Okay, how about this one? Kelsey?
Knitting?
Knitting? What did we do to knitting before we added the -ing?
We put the t.
We added the t. So is that double, drop or nothing?
Double.
Double. Good job. We doubled that t. Okay, how about this one? Trot, can you read that
for me?
Speeding.
Speeding… good job. What's the base word?
Oh, speed.
What did you do to it to add the "ing?"
Nothing.
Nothing. Good. Absolutely nothing. Just added the "ing."
This is a wonderful time to be restructuring reading programs because we know so much about
how children learn to read. It, there's no real guesswork in it anymore. There is enormous
amount of direction available now to people who are really starting to craft reading programs
that work for all children.
The RISE program — and the focused efforts of Johnson's staff--appear to be working.
When Dr. Walpole arrived at the school, only one third of students met the Virginia state
reading standard at the end of third grade. Two years later, that figure had risen to
one half.
My relationship with the teachers here has grown enormously. So that they know that when
I'm reading in academic books and trying to cook up new ideas about how to teach our children
better, um, that I will respect their response to those ideas. And as they try them in their
classrooms I'll watch, I'll talk to them about it and we'll make something out of those ideas
that works for our children.