New programs increase reading and math skills at St. John the Baptist Elementary

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St. John the Baptist Elementary students who met their reading goals received a special T-shirt as one of their rewards.

DRAPER — As the 2021-22 academic year draws to a close, students at St. John the Baptist Elementary School are celebrating their achievements. Among those is their progress in reading and math.

The school implemented Collaboration Literacy Hours in fall 2020, after the pandemic lockdown, for kindergarten through second grade to help students catch up on lost learning. This past school year they added third grade to the program.

“We knew there would be some learning loss due to Covid, being out of the school and not having that in-person instruction,” said Gina Parker, the school’s director of curriculum and faculty development.

The literacy team provides instruction in phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary and spelling patterns though a program called Words Their Way. Parker and her team spend one hour each day in the classroom working with individual students while the teachers and paraeducators lead small group reading times.

To help students get back on track, the school also added a read-and-return program for all grades through fifth grade. Each week, students took home a book at what is called their “just right reading level.” They then recorded a talk about the book; these talks were played during the school’s morning announcements. The teachers also challenged the students to read, collectively, more than 50 million words. The students exceeded that goal: By the end of the year, 169,704,471 words were read, and on average the students’ scaled scores went up 30 points, while the grade equivalent went up one grade level.

One measure of the program’s popularity is that all the students in Karina Johnson’s first-grade class and Andrea Arnold’s second-grade class reached their goals. Johnson’s students read an average of 50 books while Arnold’s students read an average of 100. To celebrate their achievements, they received read Accelerated Reader T-shirts, along with an ice cream party. Students in other classes individually achieved their goals and were given a T-shirt, too. Eighty-nine students who doubled their T-shirt goals had lunch with Principal Nikki Ward on May 19.

In the fourth-quarter reading contest alone, students read more than 53 million words.

“We’ve seen a lot of growth in their reading,” Parker said. “Our students haven’t taken as much time to close that Covid learning loss gap because they’re getting one-on-one or small-group instruction inside of their classroom.”

This year the school also implemented a new math program, Into Math, which more closely aligns with common core standards than the previous program and incorporates technology and STEM projects.

“It’s pretty rigorous: there’s lots of word problems and real-world problems and projects,” Parker said.

The program, introduced this year, challenged students, said Parker, who praised the work of teachers in learning and implementing the new math program.

“The students struggled at the beginning, and it was hard, but with perseverance they’ve all made tremendous growth,” she said. “We’ve had great success with our assessment scores.”