RCE Classroom Backgrounds

Listed on the right are the 6 classrooms used in RCE. Clicking on the school name will present background information about that particular school.	Allen Street School Lansing, Michigan
	Benchmark School (Media, Pennsylvania)
	East Park Elementary School Danville, Illinois
	Kamehameha Elementary (Honolulu, Hawaii)
	Mahalia Jackson Elementary (Harlem, New York)
	Neal Elementary (San Antonio, Texas)

The videotaped program you will see features a third-grade classroom at Allen Street School in Lansing, Michigan. Allen Street is a K-5 school with an enrollment of 428 students. It also houses six sessions of the state-operated Headstart program.

The student population is racially and ethnically mixed. The children come from low-income homes, including many single-parent homes. Eighty-six percent of the children receive a free or reduced-priced hot lunch and/or breakfast. Most of them live in the neighborhood surrounding the school and walk to school every day. A few children are bused, as they live across a major highway, and walking to school would not be safe.

The teacher, Laura Pardo, has been at Allen Street School for two years. Before coming to Allen Street, Mrs. Pardo spent five years as a seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade teacher of mathematics and computers, and one year as a sixthgrade social studies and reading teacher. At the time of the videotaping, she was completing her master's degree in reading instruction at Michigan State University. According to Mrs. Pardo, it was her course work at Michigan State that led her to the ideas, theories, and philosophies about teaching and literacy in the primary grades that she now practices in her classroom and that are evident in this videotape.

As you watch the tape, you will notice several things about Mrs. Pardo's teaching. You will see, for example, that she uses a unit approach for content area studies, and that she presents the units in a logical sequence over the school year. This approach increases the likelihood that students will build background knowledge in a systematic way. You will see, too, that Mrs. Pardo integrates reading and writing instruction into content area lessons. She does this because she believes that integrating instruction brings process and content together, allows for a more natural flow to the day's activities, and provides more opportunities to teach strategies for successful reading and writing.

Mrs. Pardo teaches her students strategies for independent learning. In the videotape, you will see her using three such strategies: daily focus journals, concept maps, and think-sheets.

The program of videotaped lessons you will see takes place in the Benchmark School in Media, Pennsylvania. This is a private school with and enrollment of 168 students in grades on through eight. Dr. Irene Gaskins is the founder and director of the school. Benchmark School is a place for children who have had difficulty learning to read. Although Benchmark students are bright children whose tested intelligence ranges from low average to superior, they are in the school because they read poorly. In fact, most children enter Benchmark as nonreaders.

In addition to their trouble with reading, many of the children tend to be disorganized, passive, inattentive, inflexible, impulsive, and nonpersistent. However, the vast majority of these children do not have severe emotional and behavioral problems. Most of them possess well-developed verbal skills and a wide range of background knowledge that they have used, along with their considerable charm, to cope with the expectations of their previous schools.

The easiest way to describe the primary reading problem of most of the entering students is that they have difficulty in reading words. In fact, the number of words they can recognize accurately is very limited. The difficulties Benchmark children have in recognizing words are related to the problems they have in other academic areas. Typically, these problems are with written composition and in applying reading and thinking skills to the learning of science and social studies. Before a program was developed to help Benchmark students learn to recognize words, the school had only limited success in helping them succeed in other academic areas. Now, students who spend time at Benchmark not only learn how to recognize words and to read with comprehension, they also improve their written composition skill and their ability to learn content are information.

The Benchmark Word Identification Program, which was developed between 1982 and 1987, is result of an analysis of the research literature and a six-year cycle of development, try-out, evaluation, and refinement. In the videotape, you will see excepts from two word identification lessons that were taught toward the end of the school year. These lessons are from the beginning component of the Word Identification Programs. You will also see excerpts from the integrated language arts lessons, including a small group reading lesson and writing activities.

Teaching the lessons is Marjorie Downer. Mrs. Downer taught at Benchmark School for 16 years and is and experienced and successful teacher of students who have had trouble with reading. She and Dr. Gaskins are the co-authors of the Benchmark Word Identification Program. The students we see her preprimer, primer, or first grade levels.

As you view the videotape, remember that these word identification lessons are one part of Benchmark’s total reading program.

The program of lessons contained in the videotape features Kathy Johnson's third-grade class at East Park Elementary School in Danville, Illinois, which is 120 miles south of Chicago. East Park has an enrollment of over 800 students. About 60% of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. There is a 45% minority student population and a high mobility rate.

The principal at East Park, Mark Denman, encourages many activities to foster literacy. There is a schoolwide reading program in which time is set aside in each class every day for free reading. This program is supported by the multiple copies of novels the school has purchased for the classrooms. In addition, the staff and Mr. Denman have worked very hard to make the school library an inviting place for the students. The teachers take part in reading incentive programs and sponsor special events to encourage independent reading.

The teacher, Mrs. Johnson, has taught for 20 years in a range of special education and mainstream classes. Most of the children in her class are eight or nine years old. Each day the children participate in activities designed to encourage them to read and write independently. In the videotape, you will see three of these activities: independent reading, guided reading, and writing.

The lesson you will see takes place in a school in Hawaii. The children in the class are descendants of the original Polynesian inhabitants of Hawaii. On the whole, Polynesian-Hawaiians are a poor, disadvantaged, minority group. They have high rates of school dropout and high rates of welfare enrollment. As a group, they perform dismally on standardized achievement tests. According to a recent report, "The problems faced by native Hawaiians are as serious as those faced by any minority group in the United States."

The class shown in the videotape includes a cross-section of Polynesian Hawaiian children, some of whom are also part Japanese, Chines, Portuguese, or Filipino. They are third graders reading on grade level. They are taking part in a special program sponsored by the Kamehameha Schools. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the Yankees were taking over Hawaii, the last member of the family of King Kamehameha the Great, Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, place her ancestral lands in perpetual trust for the education of native Hawaiian children. The result was the Kamehameha Schools. The Kamehameha Schools are prominent Hawaiian cultural institution, " the legacy of a princess."

The methods used in the lesson shown on the videotape were developed by the Kamehameha Early Education Program (KEEP). The KEEP reading program has been perfected over a period of 15 years by an interdisciplinary team that includes anthropologists and psychologists as well as educators. Many KEEP techniques are similar to those used in good reading instruction anywhere in the United States, but you will see that a few techniques are quite distinctive. Without the KEEP program, native Hawaiian children have averaged between the 25th and 20th percentiles on standardized reading tests. With the KEEP program, Hawaiian children, in regular public schools as well as the Kamehameha Schools, have averaged at or near the 50th percentile for a number of years.

Teaching the lesson is Joyce Ahuna-Ka’ai’ai. She has 10 years of teaching experience, the last four as a KEEP teacher. Part Hawaiian herself, she is regarded as a master teacher. She teaches at the KEEP demonstration school on the main Kamehameha schools campus, where this lesson was taped.

The videotape you will see is of second-grade classroom where reading and writing are interwoven, rather than separate subjects. The students in this classroom write and read to communicated with other members of the class, their families, and themselves. Reading and writing happen throughout the school day for reasons that have meaning to children.

The classroom is located in Mahalia Jackson School (P.S. 122) in New York City’s Harlem. Most of the students live in public housing projects close to the school, while some are bused from Spanish Harlem. Almost all of the 28 students in the class participate in the free lunch program. The teacher, Dawn Harris Martine, has taught for four years, all of them at this school.

As you watch the tape, look carefully at the level of children’s participation as readers and writers in this classroom. You will see a variety of contexts that children draw on their reading for writing, how their compositions become part of reading, and how talk is interspersed throughout literacy events.

The program of lessons you will see was videotaped in Ann Hemmeter’s kindergarten classroom at the Neal Elementary School in San Antonio, Texas, where about 90% if the students are Hispanic. The school is located in a low-income neighborhood of small, well -kept, single-family homes. Most of the children enter kindergarten speaking English. Most classes contain more than 20 children. At the time of this videotaping, the kindergarten class consisted of 15 children, 10 boys and 5 girls. There was one teacher and no aide. This is a full-day program, and most of the children are offered a free lunch in the cafeteria.

The teacher, Mrs. Hemmeter, has been teaching for over 20 years in kindergarten and the primary grades. Her approach to teaching kindergarten has been influenced by the emergent literacy perspective. As you will see in the videotape, she has drawn extensively from emergent literacy research in developing her literacy-based program.

In brief, a literacy-based kindergarten program fosters the emergence of literate behavior by providing children with many opportunities to listen to and look at books, to use print to learn and play, and to draw or print in ways that resemble writing. Children are surrounded by books, signs, and writing materials and they are encouraged to read, draw, or write many times each day. They role play begging readers, and writing, setting up varied activities that lead children to use reading and writing socially as they play and instrumentally as they solve everyday problems.

Another aspect of Mrs. Hemmeter’s program is it involvement of parents. Mrs. Hemmeter knows that it is important to show parents how their children are learning and how parents can contribute to goals of this program. Parents are welcome to visit the classroom at any time so that they can understand it better and can pick up ideas about how to help their children at home. At the beginning of the year, Mrs. Hemmeter sends a letter home to each child’s parents containing samples of writing done in previous years. These samples include the first writing a child has done-- a picture accompanied by a story attached. The more advanced samples show invented print. The range of samples sent to parents allows them to see a progression in children’s knowledge of writing and in their development as writers. Mrs. Hemmeter also sends newsletters home every week explaining what will be studied during the week and suggesting ways parents could help extend what their children are learning and what the children might bring to school.

Reading Classroom Explorer:Classroom Background

Reading Classroom Explorer:
Classroom Background