For six years Booneville Elementary School has been implementing a process in which students are held to not just a high standard, but a standard which will guarantee success as they progress through their educational careers.
The kindergarten team at Booneville Elementary School – shown in photo from left Chelsea Golden, Lesile Cook, Lisa Crenshaw, Morgan Johnson, Adrian Nichols and (not pictured) Taylor Lenihan – is making sure the district’s students get off to the best start possible.
Utilizing Saxon Phonics for the second year and Saxon Math for the first time this year the team has had no less than 80 percent of their students across the grade reach mastery of every power standard taught for the first quarter of the school year.
“Every grade level, (BES Principal Jyme Beth) Mrs. Diffee requires that we set a mastery percent goal. Pretty much school wide it’s 80 percent or above for literacy or math,” said Cook.
“Eighty percent of the kindergartners are at mastery of each of the standards we’ve been teaching so far,” said Golden. “On a couple standards we are at 94 percent.”
There are 91 students in kindergarten.
What are those kindergarten standards?
“Power standards, or essential standards, the way we had it explained to us is you have boulders, you have rocks, and you have butterflies,” Golden said. “Boulders is what they have to be successful on to be able to move on and succeed in the next grade level.
“Your rocks are what you want to be able to teach but they’re not necessarily the ones that have to be mastered but you will continue working on those throughout the year. Butterflies are things that are fun to teach but not necessary.”
“This summer we all sat down and went through our math and our literacy standards. We highlighted what we considered most essential to have mastered before they become first graders,” said Cook.
That was then cut, not necessarily into even quarters, but with defined goal points because many are ongoing.
“A lot of kindergarten standards are kind of complicated because they will run all year long,” said Golden. "We’re learning letters all the way up to spring break.”
That does not mean progressing through the alphabet A through Z.
“They’ve got to be able to identify the letters, capital and lower case, and know the correct sound so they can start coding and decoding words,” Golden said. “The first letters we learned were L, O, G, H.”
“By week three they’re already able to read the word ‘log,’ or spell the word ‘log,’ said Golden. “With H in there you can spell the word ‘hog,’ At this (nine week) point we have a whole caterpillar (the words are arranged as portions of a caterpillar on the wall) of words they can read with all the letters.”
“And answer questions about key details in stories,” Cook added.
Eventually that will lead to reading sight words
Math standards include counting to 100 and number recognition. There are also standards for shapes.
For the numbers, this nine weeks the hope was to be counting tor 35, with a goal of through 50 by semester’s end, through 100 by spring break, culminating in starting addition and subtraction to 10 before going into first grade.
“We’re also throwing in counting by 5s and 10s throughout the year,” Crenshaw said.
“We’re seeing some really good improvement this year,” said Cook. “The phonics we used last year, at this point we as a team felt really defeated. We weren’t seeing the progress we were wanting.”
Team kindergarten is also unchanged from a year ago as Cook is in her ninth year of teaching, and second at BES; Johnson is in her second year, both here; Golden is in her third year here and ninth overall; Crenshaw is in her second year of her second stint here; Lenihan is in her fourth year and second in kindergarten; and Nichols is in her third year, all in kindergarten.
The previous phonic program had been utilized by Golden, Cook, and Crenshaw in previous teaching locations.
“It was a tough transition because it was all we had ever known,” Golden said of the change. “But we also knew it was not working.”
“This is exciting. Our kids are doing really well,” said Cook. “We’re a whole lot less stressed than we were this time last year.”
On Tuesday Diffee gave a data driven presentation to the Booneville School Board detailing how the school deals with being a professional learning community in which she highlighted the standard process as a whole.
“We know ahead of time what we want them to know, we know how we’re going to know if they know it – we do formative assessments and if you don’t know it, it’s not for a grade it’s just information for us to assess our teaching and their learning,” said Diffee. “If 80 percent of the class doesn’t know it, that means we did not do a very good job teaching it. Automatic reteach.”
“We have 12 to 15 power standards we are working on and the rest of is things it’s good to know,” Diffee adds.
For example if the power standard is long division the student will also be able to multiply, add, and subtract through the trajectory that got them to the power standard.
Those failing to reach the mastery level get extra attention as students are placed into groups to address given skills.
“They are going to a group based solely on that skill until they do understand it. We don’t quit,” said Diffee. “When we get to a summative, end of course, if they do not pass it then they will go to RTI – response to intervention for a third level of support and someone else will pick up their file.”
Group learning occurs only when “it is not their power standard time,” added Diffee.
“We have what we call WIN time. WIN time is What I Need,” said Diffee. “Everybody goes somewhere else, for whatever they need. Everybody needs something.”