Today we attended the district literacy meetings that are held once a month.
The first meeting is called the literacy leader’s meeting. This involves all literacy coaches, title 1 reading specialists and all librarians. We present to one another ideas about literacy. This past November I presented with the literacy coach and title 1 teacher about online resources for reading. We shared with the group information such as Reading A-Z (literacy coach), Reading Rockets.org, (title 1) and e-books (myself). I showed TumbleBooks and bookflix (by Scholastic).
Today’s presentor was another elementary librarian and one of the third grade teachers she works with. They presented on Accelarated Reader (AR). a software that children use to take quizzes on books they have read. The tests are supposed to indicate the students comprehension. There were a few questions raised at the meeting about the validity of some of the quizzes. Some questions give the answer away in the question and mostly focus on recall.
The presenting librarian had spent time at AR trainings this summer. She implemented some of the things she learned this school year, particularly with the teacher she brought along and they shared their successes with the group. Basically what they did was encourage student to read tons of books and take the tests. The librarian put posters all over the school advertising how many words students had read. One class read over 1 million words. As students passed the tests they moved up in reading levels, from ready reader to super ready, etc. The librarian reported that students were very excited to reach each new level. She found her year to be so successful that she is going to pay $2500 for the online verison so she will have a quiz for nearly 95% of her collection.
I have mixed feelings on AR. I see both benefiits and disadvantages. While it’s great that students read 1 million words, I’m not sure how this ties to helping them love reading for reading’s sake. What about poems with few words, what about picture books with no words? These type of books are wonderful, but students who hyped about AR might skip over them. I hate that students would not check out a library book just because it does not have an AR sticker attached to it.
On the other hand, I do have AR in my building. I purchase the quizzes for individual books. I have no plans to purchase the online verison. We do use AR to determine if students have read and understood Mark Twain books and I have individual teachers who use AR as part of their reading incentive program. This year I did a big reading incentive program encouraging students to read 15 minutes a night at home. Parents have to validate this and turn records in each month. Each month we recognize the students who make the goal. In May students who turned in mintues for 5/6 month get to have an overnight at school.
Because of this reading incentive program, I just do not see myself doing a big AR program in the future, although I am happy to hear it was successful for another building.
