Huntington Elementary introduces "Science of Reading" program, builds new book room

CHILLICOTHE― Huntington Elementary School has remastered its reading program this year following an almost $200,000 grant and two years of professional development on the Science of Reading.

The school was awarded $180,000 in 2019 from the School Quality Improvement Grant award from the Ohio Department of Education to train teachers reading techniques based in science, said principal Heidi Gray.

"We just had some gaps," Gray said. "I would say we have the best teachers and they were working so hard, but because we had the gaps in the curriculum, we weren't seeing the results that we needed and now that they have all the knowledge and the tools that we need, we're seeing a difference in our kids."

To supplement the new curriculum, Pam O'Neil, curriculum specialist and media specialist, along with reading specialists Heidi Kellough and Tess Hatmacher, have spent the last three years building the school's new book room. The room is full of diligently organized books (credited in part to O'Neil's experience as a librarian) that teach decoding and phonetics.

The room has thousands of titles to support and supply Huntington's teachers with resources to use in their classrooms, with over 1,000 unique titles and 6,000 total books.

Hatmacher said the school previously used books with levels based on how many words students could read per minute. However, reading a certain amount of words per minute didn't signify that the students could understand and take apart the words.

Now, using the phonetics program "Fundations," the reading levels are more focused on decoding and understanding words.

"It allows the kids to feel successful as they're reading those books independently," Kellough said.

The reading room also has "knowledge bins," which are boxes that contain multiple books on one subject, like Martin Luther King Jr. or ocean animals, so that teachers have a variety of books on different topics that they can teach in the classroom. Teachers submitted topic ideas for the knowledge bins to match their lesson plans.

First-grade teacher Lydia Alexander said she "fell in love" with the new reading program.

"Before, it was a lot of planning on the teachers to try and differentiate our groups and we were just pooling and working with what we had, which wasn't the most abundant resources to have," Alexander said. "[The new program,] has all of our standards and what we're working with, we're able to use it with a variety of students. So it's very well differentiated for our lower kids all the way up to our higher kids to work on the skills that they need."

Alexander said the decodable texts are especially helpful for the younger students at the school so they can practice new skills. Gray said Alexander and the other teachers have adapted well to the new program.

"I had a teacher one day say, 'I wish I would have known this years ago,'" Gray said. "It's powerful stuff as far as how the brain works and how they learned to read and how all the parts fit together."

The grant money was also used to train six teachers to be facilitators for Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, LETRS. O'Neil said having their own in-house facilitators allows the school to train new teachers who enter the district. She also said that the trained facilitators have access to the latest research and best practices so they can continually share with our staff.

"The teachers feel comfortable with it this year," Hatmacher said. "It's flowing and it can only can continue to grow."

Megan Becker is a reporter for the Chillicothe Gazette. Call her at 740-349-1106, email her at mbecker@gannett.com or follow her on Twitter @BeckerReporting.

This article originally appeared on Chillicothe Gazette: Huntington introduces new "Science of Reading" program, book room