HELPING YOUR CHILD SUCCEED IN SCHOOL Grace Miller Elementary School Welcome Parents and Guardians

Research in 2000 indicated schools needed to modify their instruction to help the 20% of students who have difficulty learning to read. Grace Miller has implemented many interventions to help all students succeed.

U.S. 4 th graders were ranked ninth in the world in reading with only three nations having scores significantly higher. (England, Netherlands and Sweden)

“Family participation in education is twice as predictive of students’ academic success as the family’s socio-economic status.” “ Catching up gets harder, not easier, with each year that passes.” “The earlier in a child’s life that parent involvement in education begins, the more powerful and positive the effects.” “Children most familiar with nursery rhymes were top readers three years later, regardless of intelligence.”

“Practice makes perfect”. Just reading more is a powerful contributor to the development of accurate, fluent, high comprehension reading (Allington 2009)

The Effect of the Volume of Reading at Home on Reading Achievement for 5 th graders Achievement Percentile Minutes of Reading per Day Words per Year 90 th 40.42,357, th , th 1.651,000

At every grade level, reading more pages in school and at home each day was associated with higher reading scores.

Recommendations to Parents: Increase the reading material in your home. Go to the public library once a week. Visit our school library often. Set aside a family reading time. Help your child sound out words. And then re-read the sentence allowing their brain to see the word successfully again. Help your child select books in his/her ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development).

Research based on 38,000 students indicates: 1) the amount of reading students do is related to their reading scores; 2) students still spend too much time on worksheets and not enough on reading; 3) students whose homes supported reading had higher reading achievement.

The amount of reading done even by disabled students is positively correlated to reading achievement

“No matter how much instruction students receive in how to decode vocabulary, improve comprehension, or increase fluency, if they seldom apply what they are learned in the context of real reading experiences, they will fail to improve as much as they could.” --Donalyn Miller

“Reading is both a cognitive and an emotional journey. Reading changes your life. Reading unlocks worlds unknown or forgotten, taking travelers around the world and through time. Reading helps you escape the confines of school and pursue your own education.” --Donalyn Miller “The Book Whisperer”

Help With Math Facts  Helping children master math facts is one of the best (and easiest) ways to help your child succeed in math. Use the 3 second rule!  When a student has math fact fluency, the student’s brain is free to solve higher level math problems without the blockade of having to process the basic calculation.

Summer Set Back Children who don’t read over the summer lose 3 months of reading achievement over the summer = 2years at the end of elementary Reading a dozen books over the summer for primary age students or 5 to 6 books for upper grade students erases the loss and is as powerful as summer school. Practicing math facts over the summer will allow the student to start the year ready to learn new math concepts.