The generous support of School of Education donors is providing life-changing experiences for teacher candidates and the children they teach.
The School of Education’s Stewardship Committee reccently funded an internal grant to support literacy in local schools.
With the grant, teacher candidates Ashleigh Alexander ’16, Victoria Bell ’16, Vee Bland ’16, Caleigh Fidler ’16, Amy Livingston ’16 and Anne Aurelia Lewis ’16 created a Virtual Professional Learning Community project as part of their senior seminar course. They reviewed the School Improvement Plans of four local schools in the Alamance-Burlington School System: Harvey R. Newlin Elementary School, Grove Park Elementary School, Andrews Elementary School and Alexander Wilson Elementary School. Through careful analysis, the candidates noticed that all of these plans displayed the common themes of lower than desired student reading levels and high parent expression of wanting to be more involved in their children’s reading experiences.
To remedy that problem, they created a website designed to provide families with information about childhood language and literacy development as well as strategies parents could utilize to become more involved in their children’s reading experiences. To complement the website, the group designed a bookmark containing suggestions and tips for parents, and then professionally printed 2,000 copies of this bookmark, which were distributed to every preschool, kindergarten, first, second and third grade classroom at all four schools.
These bookmarks were funded by the Stewardship Committee and help to put literacy tips in the hands of 2,000 children. These tips and suggestions listed on the bookmark provided information particularly pertaining to methods parents could use to engage with their child and help stimulate a child’s ideas about a book.
The School of Education would like to thank al donors for making this possible.