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News Myers/Ganoung Elementary - Second Graders Learn to Read Tucson, AZ - Second grade students at Myers/Ganoung Elementary ended their school year with truly exceptional reading success. In January, the school's principal Alice McBride integrated an exciting new pilot program into the curriculum. This program is based on a co-teaching model using the new teaching tool My Reading Coach™. The entire 2nd grade class began using the computer program every day for half an hour. All students who completed at least 30 of the 47 lessons showed improvement in their reading comprehension. On average these students improved almost two grade levels in only four months. Before using My Reading Coach™, reading comprehension scores for these 2nd graders averaged a 1.7 grade level. Now these students' average grade level is 3.6, well above average! Of those students who did not get to lesson 30 in the four months of using My Reading Coach™, 85% still showed reading comprehension improvement. These students averaged almost one grade level improvement from 1.7 to 2.5. Additionally, the thirteen non-native English speakers who took part in this pilot program improved more than one grade level. Their scores went from a 1.8 to a 3.1 grade level. Ms. Oloņo, the bilingual teacher at Myers/Ganoung commented, "I notice a lot more English going on in the classroom. They are asking me to read to them in English." Programs proven successful with ESL (English as a Second Language) students are especially important in Arizona with its large population of non-English speaking children. With Proposition 203 going into effect in September, Arizona school administrators are looking for proven English immersion programs to replace traditional bilingual education. The improvement at Myers/Ganoung Elementary was made possible by the collaboration between the school, the YWCA of Tucson and MindPlay. The YWCA of Tucson financially supported the effort by donating computers to the school. MindPlay developed the software by using the teaching method of speech pathologist and veteran reading teacher Jim Larrabee. The My Reading Coach™ software focuses on phonetic decoding as a way to improve reading comprehension. Pre and Post-testing was done by the Tucson Unified School District using Degrees of Reading Power™ (DRP) reading comprehension tests from Touchstone Applied Science Associates®. See the following charts for further description of the students' improvements. This chart shows the grade level improvement from DRP Units for the students at Myers/Ganoung Elementary who completed 30 lessons or more - 23 students, 4 of whom were ESL students.
This chart shows the grade level improvement from DRP Units for the Bilingual students at Myers/Ganoung Elementary - 13 students.
Visit www.mindplay.com/press/release7.html for more information on statistics.
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