LITERACY TAKES LEAD AT LAKE CORMORANT ELEMENTARY
Elementary adds specialist and book room
On a recent Thursday morning — direct from her office inside Lake Cormorant Elementary — principal Margaret Boyd made no bones about her school’s reading instruction not exactly being unique to DeSoto County.
However, shortly thereafter, Dr. Boyd became an instant cheerleader and stressed the importance of her 665 K-5 students buying into one common goal.
“We want to be literacy leaders,” she said. “We’ve fully implemented all the Common Core Standards and our children have really become avid readers.”
One driving force is Scholastic READ 180, a reading intervention computer software program that’s being taken advantage of by some. Others have access to actual human beings.
“We have a lot of support because we have a literacy coach, Kim Alexander, who comes to our school every Monday,” said Boyd, in her second year. “Then we have a literacy specialist, Ashley Bynum, who helps us with whatever we need to make sure we’re getting there.”
Lake Cormorant also used leftover American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds to create a book room, where selections are available on all the kids’ levels. First-grade students in Paula Pierce’s class had “Watch Me Plant a Garden,” where, in addition to learning new vo- cabulary words, they were using rulers to determine how far apart to plant the seeds.
“Teaching literacy is the main key,” Pierce said. “We have to get them to read to work math problems, social studies, science — everything is reading.”
The garden book was considered Level F, one that afforded Pierce an opportunity to continue down yet another educational path.
“We go over the parts of the book like the title, the characters and the setting,” she said. “They do a lot of predicting on what they think might happen; they have to infer. (Reading) is everything.”
It’s a fact that Title 1 teacher Alice Duett can’t argue.
“We live in a literate world and they have to be able to read and understand,” she said, “and it starts here. We invite the reluctant readers in and we try to get them to develop a love for reading by surrounding them with literature.”