A love for reading
By Leah Jacoboski Middle/high school English and language arts instructor This school year, the English and language arts department at Loyal Middle/High School adopted a program from the American Reading Company (ARC), which is purposed to engage students using tiered reading materials and challenging instruction.
The constant goal of a teacher is to ensure that each child within his or her classroom is learning and growing. With this, we know that what is best for one child is not always best for another in trying to achieve this growth. Through ARC’S focus on grade-level instruction for reading and writing, a second practice is incorporated to accommodate learners at every level, providing hundreds of books within our classroom libraries which follow genre studies within our grade-level curriculum, but are also featured in multiple reading levels, thus catering to every student’s individual abilities.
Implementing new curriculum is never easy, for teachers or for students, and incorporating the ARC program was no different. Along the way, we had many meetings and collaboration with special education instructors, administrators, Title I teachers and ARC coaches, as well as teachers from other schools in the area who are also incorporating ARC into their curriculum.
This support helped immensely, but was not nearly as valuable as hearing regular feedback from the students.
One component of this curriculum is conferencing with students one-onone daily, monitoring their reading, vocabulary and writing progress. And it was these meetings that I found most encouraging, most helpful and most enlightening. Students who never liked to read before devoured the “Hook Books” the company offers, thus projecting them to continuing reading within a series.
Students who were avid readers, albeit steadied to one genre, were surprised and delighted to find a more challenging genre they also enjoyed. And best of all, because of the way books are introduced during the first unit of the curriculum, students were able to spend ample time figuring out which books and genres they truly enjoy and in which they are able to read (because of the leveled texts) instead of being dictated which books they are required to read.
Since their initial assessment in the fall, my current eighth graders have shown tremendous growth, some of them moving up one, two, three or even four grade levels in reading! I am so pleased that my students are developing a love for reading and am excited to see what next year will bring with this curriculum.
