Pod Squad

The Pod Squad: Making a Home to School Literacy Connection

McCornack Elementary School is a school-wide Title 1 school, with many of our students rendered academically vulnerable by the achievement gap. With this grant, we intend to build excitement around reading, strengthening skills in phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension with the implementation of integrated technology in the student’s own home. This grant will provide struggling second grade students with a “virtual teacher in a bag,” giving them the additional practice needed to bring them up to grade level and close the achievement gap. Lessons will be delivered via iPod, in their teacher’s voice, which students will listen to nightly four times a week. In addition to the iPod, each bag will contain books, vocabulary cards and other supplementary materials which will enhance instruction. Concepts taught during the regular school day will be reinforced on the iPod lesson. Upcoming curriculum can also be pre-taught via the iPod to scaffold student learning. To further insure the success of this program, team members have been recruited to provide representation across specialties: Mary Kuhl, second grade classroom teacher, Todd Aydelott, co-coordinator of McCornack’s Title 1 program and Regina Ligon, Technology Support Specialist Level 2.

Why important?

Reading is the crucial key to school success in all subject areas. If children have a solid foundation of reading skills by the time they complete second grade, they can spend their time reading to learn as opposed to learning to read. This program is flexible enough to meet the needs of multiple learning styles and diverse abilities of all our students, giving them much-needed additional reading practice. Students will also be able to independently practice skills without having to rely on adult support at home. By integrating the technology and “wow factor” of an iPod, students will be highly motivated and engaged, as research has shown, to do the additional work necessary to get themselves up to benchmark standards.


Who and how many?

Initially we would like to pilot this project with 20 second grade students, which represents 26% of our current second grade population, who are struggling readers. These students have been identified using DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) data; these students fall into the intensive to strategic ranges. When this pilot proves successful, we would like to find more funding to expand it to other grade levels. Currently in grades one through five (kindergarten has not yet been tested) we have 151 DIBELS-identified at-risk readers, which is 44% of McCornack’s population, affirming the need to expand this program to other grade levels.



Evaluate

We will evaluate our success using both DIBELS testing and the 4J Reading Kit assessments. DIBELS progress monitoring takes place bi-weekly throughout the entire school year and both the DIBELS benchmark assessments and the 4J Reading Kit assessments occur three times a year-- fall, winter and spring. The compilation of this data will be used to drive and adjust lesson plans individually, with the bi-weekly data enabling dynamic changes and enhancements to each student’s Pod Squad plan as needed.

In addition, anecdotal information will be solicited from parents via a feedback card that will go home with students every night. We will also make subjective observations of children’s eagerness to participate in class as a result of their increased confidence in their ability to read more fluently.




Does this proposal build upon existing programs and if so, how?

As a school-wide Title 1 school, identified at-risk McCornack students are part of the model of small group learning that takes place in our building daily, taught by Instructional Assistants and supervised by Title 1 co-coordinators Mary Mowday and Todd Aydelott. Our Pod Squad program would give these at-risk children a daily third dose of instruction.

In addition, we have recently adopted McGraw-Hill’s “Treasures” language arts curriculum, which is a highly enriched program which lends itself well to the Pod Squad program. We can utilize some of the “Treasures” curriculum pieces to provide remediation, build excitement around reading and pre-teach concepts and stories.

While not at our school, we have patterned the Pod Squad after Carol Greig Pitetti’s highly successful Reading Buddies program at Howard Elementary, geared toward kindergarten and first graders. Ms. Pitetti’s program achieved astonishing results at Howard. Citing DIBELS data, in the fall of 2005, only 25% of students participating in Reading Buddies were at benchmark. By the spring of 2006, 98% were at benchmark, with 50% of those exceeding benchmark. In the fall of 2006, 55% were at benchmark while in the spring of 2007 98% were at benchmark, with 83% of those exceeding benchmark. We’d like to translate this remarkable success to our students at McCornack!