Young Audiences makes learning, teaching fun

Most adults remem­ber sit­ting through dry phon­ics classes, as teach­ers tried to drill the prin­ci­ples and rules into their heads. Teach­ers are now real­iz­ing this may not be the best way for all stu­dents to learn the fun­da­men­tals for read­ing and writing.

First grade teach­ers at East­wood Ele­men­tary School are receiv­ing the tools to help their stu­dents learn how to read in dif­fer­ent ways now due to a grant that enabled the school to bring in teach­ers from Young Audi­ences of North­east Ohio.

“For teach­ing, it’s all about devel­op­ing many dif­fer­ent strate­gies to use with chil­dren to help them learn,” said Robert Rybak, prin­ci­pal at East­wood Ele­men­tary. “No one strat­egy works all the time, with the same kids.”

For two weeks, first graders at the school have had an oppor­tu­nity to spend time with Susan Weber and Colleen Clarke being “word detec­tives.” The activ­ity allows the stu­dents to lis­ten to a story and pick out words with dif­fer­ent sounds when they hear them. Stu­dents are also encour­aged to act out dif­fer­ent parts of the story, which enables to them to get up and move around.

“I think the kids are a lit­tle more engaged, because of the story. They’re really lis­ten­ing to the words we’re try­ing to have them find,” said first grade teacher Kristi Walter.

Accord­ing to Rybak, the money for the pro­gram came from a grant obtained by Young Audi­ences as well a grant obtained by the school from the Nord Fam­ily Foun­da­tion. A small amount also came from Eastwood’s build­ing fund.

“The idea of the pro­gram is to teach lit­er­acy and read­ing through the arts,” said Weber, who works as a teach­ing artist and lives in Cleve­land Heights. “My art form is the­ater arts, while Colleen is a dancer.”

In addi­tion to learn­ing vowel sounds, the stu­dents are also prepar­ing for a per­for­mance on Fri­day to which their fam­i­lies are invited.

Rybak said the school plans on con­tin­u­ing the pro­gram with Young Audi­ences as long as the school can afford it.

“I see that hap­pen­ing. It’s really ben­e­fi­cial to the chil­dren,” he said.

Wal­ter has seen a dif­fer­ence in the way her stu­dents react to the new teach­ing method and it has made her adapt her own teach­ing methods.

“I did it last year, and I’m get­ting them up and mov­ing a lit­tle more. It really engaged them, and they like it,” she said. “Get­ting them mov­ing a lit­tle more is won­der­ful, because they’re first graders, and they need to be mov­ing a lot more than I typ­i­cally would have them move.”

Posted by Scott Mahoney on Jan 20 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.