School tries putting words in easy reach
By Derrick DePledge
Advertiser Education Writer
Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Adveritser
PEARL CITY — The cover drawing has splashes of blue and green and orange, a young girl and her mom and dad having a swim at the beach.
Abigail Rarogal wrote and illustrated a book in her Pearl City Elementary kinder-garten class.
Inside the illustrated booklet, Abigail Rarogal, who just finished kindergarten at Pearl City Elementary School, tells of seeing fish and making sand castles and playing with her father, who was pretending to be a turtle. The writing is neat and clear, if a little wobbly, since Rarogal is still new at sounding out words, let alone spelling.
"Then we go to the sand and we eat mosobys," she wrote of her musubi lunch. "We drance sodu and wodr. I said, 'Yumy.'"
Three years ago, kindergarten at Pearl City Elementary mostly meant singing songs, cutting and pasting and coloring in the lines as youngsters adjusted to school, learned to follow the teacher and made their first tentative steps toward reading and writing.
Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Adveritser
The school's principal, Susan Hirokane, was concerned that her students needed to do more to prepare for the state's tougher standardized tests, which require more writing and reading comprehension. So the school adopted Direct Instruction, a curriculum that involves scripted, task-driven lesson plans, and obtained a federal grant that helps pay for a summer reading program.
A pre-kindergarten pupil gets help tracing a number in her summer reading program.
Direct Instruction is not unique to Pearl City Elementary. But its use here in connection with the summer program shows how some schools' attempts to meet the performance demands of the federal No Child Left Behind Act are achieving promising, if preliminary, results.
Students about to enter kindergarten or moving into first, second and third grades spend three weeks during the summer in a sort of reading boot camp that also emphasizes writing. More than half of Pearl City Elementary's students receive free or
reduced-priced lunches — the state's measure of poverty — and about a third are from military families, but Hirokane has been careful to choose a representative sample of students each summer so she can see how students from different backgrounds respond.
Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Adveritser
Students such as Rarogal are now doing work by the end of kindergarten that is more polished and advanced, and the school's third- and fifth-grade reading and math test scores have improved. This school year, students who started with Direct Instruction as kindergartners will be tested as third-graders, an important benchmark.
Sasha Broniola, 5, who will begin kindergarten in the fall, sounds out a word during the summer reading program at Pearl City Elementary School.
"I just didn't want to wait until we became a corrective-action school to do something," Hirokane said.
Pearl City Elementary used the federal reading grant and other federal money designated for high-poverty schools to bring on teachers and supplies for the summer reading program, but the grant expires this year. Hirokana will apply for the grant again, but there is no guarantee the school will get the money.
"Competition is strong," she said, "but I'm going to try."
Public schools statewide are expected to meet annual performance goals under No Child Left Behind, which requires that all students be proficient in core subjects by 2014. Test scores used by the state to determine whether schools are meeting the law declined in the 2002-03 school year — the second year students took new tests — and educators are hoping for a rebound when scores from last school year are released in a few months.
Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Adveritser
The state Department of Education has offered the schools advice and extra help to meet the standards, but schools pick their curricula, so their strategies vary.
Sera Tyrell, 5, practices spelling during the summer program for children starting kindergarten and pupils moving into Grades 1-3.
The Direct Instruction method at Pearl City Elementary is highly structured around small learning tasks that discourage teacher creativity and autonomy. The curriculum is often used by schools that need to turn around poor performance, but Pearl City Elementary has met its annual goals under No Child Left Behind, and Hirokane saw the move as pre-emptive.
Direct Instruction advocates say the greatest gains on standardized tests are made after the third year, by students who started with the curriculum as kindergartners.
While teachers in the summer program read stories aloud and help students sound out words, older students read on computers, at their own pace. Unlike traditional storytime, in which one person reads and everyone else follows, computer users put on headphones and answer reading comprehension questions based on their skill level.
Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Adveritser
A gifted student sitting next to a below-average student can be reading the same story without knowing they are doing different work. This limits opportunities for fast learners to get bored or slower students to feel frustrated. "This way, no one feels like they are falling behind, and there are no self-esteem issues," Hirokane said.
Benjamin Kemp, 5, holds up a board on which he has correctly spelled "dog." Pearl City Elementary is putting a focus on reading and writing in the early grades, in hopes of reaping higher test scores later.
School administrators and teachers have spoken to parents at family literacy events and spaghetti dinner nights to make sure they reinforce the lessons at home.
Rather than teaching their children ABCs, for example, parents are encouraged to prompt children with sounds made by letter groups, so they can decode words.
"I think most of them are getting it," said Tammy Calbero, the school's parent coordinator, who has a daughter entering fifth grade. "We don't want parents giving them mixed messages. But really we just want to make sure that parents are reading to their children."
Reach Derrick DePledge at ddepledge@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8084.
