All things beginning of year Dibels (Dynamic Indicator of Basic Early Literacy Skills) is wrapped up except for a few make-up assessments. Our very energetic team of "dibelers", consisting of special education teachers, reading specialist, the assistant principal, and myself, hit the ground running with our Dibels boxes in hands the very first day of school and haven't looked back since. All K-5 students receive this assessment at the beginning of the year (BOY), as one measure to tell us who may need extra support in fluency practice (grades 2-5), or who may need small group instruction on early reading skills, such as phonemic awareness, phoneme segmentation or letter naming (K-1). Having done Dibels for several years now, I can see the intervention with our upper classes coming to fruition. Those students who were Dibeled as kinders in 2007 (now fourth graders), are showing huge gains in fluency; great longitudinal data! We're also thrilled with what the standardized test data is showing us; if you look at last year's third grade reading commended scores at 82%, increased student fluency (rate, accuracy, prosody) seems to be impacting reading comprehension positively - along with other interventions/strategies, of course. Though there are many things that need attention in a school the first few weeks we're back, I can't tell you how much fun it is to sit with the kids one on one (and Kinders are a hoot 'cause they're just trying to figure out who the heck you are) or how important this time with them is in the scope of all things reading. There are many assessments our kids will take as they move through the grade levels, but Dibels will always be near and dear to my heart. Be sure to give a big thank you to Kathy Sederholm if you see her for gettting us going so early, to Leah Read for her extra support with the data spreadsheets, and to our fluency center volunteer coordinators Maria Raper and Jeannine Ripp for their data plan meeting this week.
Be on the lookout this weekend for an Eagle Scout Project around our school. ES candidate Pierce Fuller is set to work on the former SKIP play area and transform it for the benefit of our school. This area will consist of some really nice raised garden beds, with a long term goal of letting the A-Team and after school child care students plant, tend, and harvest over the next few months.
Try not to "labor" too intensely this weekend and enjoy the 3 days with your family and friends. We'll see you back at HP bright and early on Tuesday.
