Program in Waterford helps parents help kids

Families of students at Richard M. Moon Primary School are “Raising Readers.”

It’s one of the elements of the pilot summer program that will be held for a second year at the K-3 school to help combat the “summer slide” in learning.

The pilot program is one of six in the county offered through Stanislaus READS!, a collaborative effort between the Stanislaus Community Foundation and the Stanislaus County Library, Office of Education and Children & Families Commission to help children read at grade level by the end of third grade.

Raising Readers engages parents in reading with their children and employing strategies at home to improve kids’ skills, said Moon reading intervention specialist Maria Tillery.

“It’s about looking at reading from a different perspective,” she said, “such as visualization, which has to do with showing children it’s not about just reading words but gathering details from pictures and building vocabulary.”

In the vein of the adage “A picture is worth a thousand words,” young readers are encouraged to look at illustrations to gain information not spelled out in text.

“We talk about how you can look at pictures and see what kind of mood there is, if it’s a happy setting or a sad setting,” Tillery said.

Parents also are taught how to help children get the most out of nonfiction reading, such as looking to chapter and section titles, quotes, captions and tables of contents for information.

“And not just reading but talking with kids is important,” Tillery said. “It’s a big part of the foundation of learning.”

Yesenia Serrano, a stay-at-home mom of three Moon students and a 6-month-old, participated in Raising Readers parent sessions last summer. She was taught that when reading with the kids, she should ask them questions about how characters feel and what they think. Her school-age children – fourth-grader Victoria, third-grader Jesus and first-grader Juan – liked to read already, she said. But sitting down and working with them 20 minutes a night made a difference.

“It helped a lot with looking at things differently,” Serrano said, noting that the children began to ask her more questions.

It’s natural that as kids get older, they become more inquisitive, “they want to figure things out,” Tillery said. But sometimes children have to be explicitly taught what to ask, she said.

Tillery had one of Serrano’s boys in an intervention class and in kindergarten. “He seems a lot more motivated, willing to do the work,” she said. “And he’s opened up from a very shy state.”

Zela Owens, who’s raising grandchildren Dylan Howry, a second-grader, and Jade Howry, a first-grader, also went through Moon’s Raising Readers program, which during the summer session meets once a week for about 90 minutes to two hours.

“One of the things I didn’t realize is there are a lot of sight words (words that appear frequently on almost any page of text, such as ‘who,’ ‘he,’ ‘the,’ ‘were,’ ‘be’ and ‘their’),” she said. “They have to know 200 sight words by the time they’re out of first grade. The first week of kindergarten they start on that.”

Both grandkids are strong readers, Owens said, but there’s so much that children have to learn. Thanks to Raising Readers, “I have a lot of ideas and techniques. ... The English language requires a lot of rhyming, so there’s decoding rhyming words like ‘mad’ and ‘sad.’ There’s reading comprehension skills – they ask questions, we read and pull certain ideas out of passages.”

Expanded summer learning

Moon’s summer program will run from June 8 through July 6. Sessions are six hours – the first four academic, the final two enrichment, said Principal Steve Kuykendall.

Academic instruction incorporates Lexia Reading, a technology-based program that increases reading proficiency for all students prekindergarten through grade four and at-risk students grades four through 12.

Students also will work on so-called right-brain books, said Erin Harrison, director of after-school programs. In small groups, children are given books with only images and lines on which to create a story based on the illustrations. Finished books are published with typeface and shared with classmates.

Thanks to the Stanislaus Community Foundation, Kuykendall said, the summer session capacity is expanding this year.

“We have 582 students” at Moon, he said. “Typically, we would take the neediest 20 students of each grade. But with foundation money, we’re doubling the number of students for kindergarten and first grade.”

The school will keep the library open two days a week during summer, because not all students are able to get to the county branch library. And as it did last summer, Moon will partner with the Stanislaus County Library’s summer reading program but “amp it up” to reward participating students with prizes including school T-shirts and a pizza party.

Last summer, only about 30 Moon students fully participated in the library’s summer program, Kuykendall said. “This year, I anticipate it being higher because they (students who didn’t participate) saw these kids being recognized.”

Before school lets out for summer, Moon again will have its Kindergarten Transition Night, focused on how parents can help their children with fine motor skills, letters, numbers and family reading time to get them kindergarten-ready.

“We provide a book of activities they can do over summer,” the principal said. As with Raising Readers, “we have Spanish and English sessions. We stress the importance of talking with children, reading with them.”

This story was originally published March 20, 2016 at 6:50 PM with the headline "Program in Waterford helps parents help kids."