Berkeley County School District's teachers and staff do all sorts of creative lessons and activities every day of the year to get students excited about reading and writing, but Sept. 8 is a particularly special time of year to do it, as it is designated International Literacy Day.
As its name would suggest, the day is all about highlighting the importance of literacy – the ability to read and write.
To help ignite a love for reading, teachers often invite special guests into the classroom to read aloud with the students. In honor of International Literacy Day, Keshia Kelly’s third grade class at Berkeley Elementary received such a guest: Superintendent Dr. Anthony Dixon swung by to read “Double Trouble in Walla Walla,” a children’s book about a girl named Lulu who starts speaking in hyphenated, nonsensical words. The book celebrates language and wordplay, and is known to be funny to read aloud.
Dixon said good readers practice the skill daily.
“If we can help make a story engaging and interesting, we can get students excited about getting their hands on developmentally-appropriate books, and building confidence in their literacy skills,” Dixon said.
Of course, good readers become good writers – so getting the reading part down is essential to the next part of being literate: the ability to write.
At Bowen’s Corner Elementary, librarian Lanora Rogers spent Monday morning executing an activity that involved meeting both first and third grade literacy standards.
Rogers said constructing sentences is an area that first graders can use some extra help in and thought it would be a good idea to bring in the third graders for reinforcements. She met with multiple third and first grade classes in the media center on Monday, but started off with Kelly Eberding’s third graders working alongside Sarah Ippolito’s first graders.
The first thing Rogers did was go over what a sentence is, how to make a complete sentence, and what they can add to it to make a sentence more interesting. The first graders then worked with a third grade partner – or with a small group – to write out sentences on a worksheet.
Whenever she does activities with the students, Rogers always starts with standards. For first graders, the goal is for students to write different, grammatically correct sentences. Third grade standards are very similar, with the goal being for students to write and expand grammatically correct sentences – and eventually paragraphs.
For the most part, Rogers said students came up with some pretty complex sentences – that did not contain any run-ons (which is good). The added bonus was getting students on different grade levels to help each other out, buddy-style.
“I think they love working with one another and they can learn from each other,” she said. “I think this is could be something we do on a regular basis, and these are good groups that we have to work with.”
