Prairie Grove Elementary To Join Reading Initiative

— Prairie Grove Elementary School will join a new initiative to boost reading levels for the 2018-19 school year.

Elementary Principal Jonathan Warren told Prairie Grove School Board members about the program called Reading Initiative for Student Excellence (RISE) at last week’s meeting.

The elementary school has signed up to be a RISE Academy and kindergarten and first-grade classes will take part in the initiative. The plan is to add more grades to it in future years.

The overall goal of RISE Arkansas is to encourage a culture of reading statewide through community partners, parents and teachers. The program was developed by the Arkansas Department of Education to establish the importance of reading in homes, schools and communities.

Lincoln Elementary was selected as one of the pilot schools for the initiative for 2017-18. Other schools now are asking to join the program.

Warren said RISE has three primary goals:

Sharpen the focus and strengthen instruction.

Create community collaborations.

Build a culture of reading. Prairie Grove already is sponsoring events and activities to meet these goals, Warren said.

Celebrating Dr. Seuss week with many guest readers is an example of building a culture of reading.

To create community collaborations, the school is sponsoring four “Eat and Read” nights this year where students and parents come in, eat pizza or a hamburger and then just read. Each student leaves with a free book to take home.

The goal for “Eat and Read” nights is to get people in the door and also to target high poverty parents, Warren said. About 60 people came to the first one, 116 to the second one and 80 to the third event. The last one for the year will be April 19.

A popular community reading event is the school’s Holiday Family Night and in December, more than 600 people came to the elementary school to rotate to different stations to hear stories and read books.

Kindergarten and firstgrade teachers in the RISE Academy are required to have six days of training, follow-up meetings with specialists and instructions based on the science of reading.

Warren said the RISE Academy is changing the culture of reading from one based on beliefs to what works to one based on the science of how children learn to read. It connects the science of reading to classroom practice and creates a statewide network so teachers can share best practices.

Before when learning to read, students would use repetition, predictable patterns, heavy use of high frequency words and supportive pictures. Many times kids could fool teachers into thinking they were actually reading, Warren said.

The science of reading shows that students need to focus on mastering sounds and decoding text.

Twenty Prairie Grove teachers recently attended a RISE conference in Hot Springs and one of the teachers told School Board members she is excited about the initiative and is already seeing improvements in her students’ daily reading and writing assignments.