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Recently in the News!
The Recorder
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Photo by: Paul Franz, Greenfield Recorder |
Once finished, the craft will be raffled off as a fundraiser for the school yearbook.
“There are only three or four schools in the state that teach boatbuilding,” said Leonard, who has built four canoes with shop classes he taught in Springfield. “The reason this program was brought back was to offer something they don’t offer in other places, as a School Choice option. I thought about what we could offer that isn't done anywhere else — and that’s boatbuilding.”
Leonard owns a canoe he built himself, of native poplar, which he uses to compete in the annual Athol-to-Orange River Rat Race.
The rib-less canoe under construction — this version is called a “strip canoe” — will be made of ¾-inch strips of Spanish cedar, which is a light, durable straight-grained wood in the mahogany family, according to Leonard. The strips are rounded on one side and grooved on the other, so they easily slide into place. They are fitted together over a wooden form. When finished, they will be laminated with fiberglass resin and cloth on both sides.
“The barrel-joint construction was developed by wood-shop teachers in Indiana, in the 1970s,” Leonard explained. He said students will come out of the class with an understanding of how the forms are put together and of how fiberglass works.
The wood was purchased at a discounted price from Forest Products Associates of Greenfield and will be a dramatic red when the canoe is finished in June, said Leonard.
“This will be beautiful when it’s done,” he said. “That’s why I picked this wood. The red of the mahogany will show through.”
Raffle tickets for the canoe will go on sale for $5 and $10 at the school and at other busy locations throughout Greenfield. Leonard said the canoe will be raffled off on June 17.
You can reach Diane Broncaccio at: dbronc@recorder.com or (413) 772-0261 Ext. 277
Art is Back! |
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Art is back is here to stay! The Greenfield Public Schools are celebrating the fact that the arts are in our classrooms again. Pieces from grades K-8 were put up in various businesses downtown this past Saturday, and will remain "on exhibit" through June 17th. We encourage parents/caretakers to bring their children around town to view all of the beautiful art, as well as to try to find their own work. This artwork display will culminate with a gallery walk that coincides with the Youth Day celebration on June 17th at the Energy Park, followed by a reception at Artspace from 3-5. |
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This reception will include a silent auction to benefit the art department of the Greenfield Public Schools. Amongst the artwork to be auctioned off are pieces submitted by K-8 art teachers and artist Howard Rose from Roslyn, New York.
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The participating businesses include: Baker Office Supply, Forbes Camera Shop, About Music, Joel McFadden Storefront, Wilson's (Gallery C, 3rd floor), Taylor's Tavern, Greenfield Games, County Jeweler, The Outlet Store, Opus, World Eye Bookstore, Zemi, Simon's Stamps, Mattress Outlet, Magical Child, Home Furnishing Company, Wickles, Rooney's Arcade, Jo Jo's Café, and Clarks Sport Shop. Middle School art work is on display at the Artspace Gallery. |
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Artspace, our local community arts center, will give $25 "Artspace Dollars" to each participant, which can be used for any art program at Artspace at a later date. |
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For more information about the project, please contact Suzie Hale at the Greenfield Public Schools. She can be reached at 772-1312 or suzie.hale@gpsk12.org. Contact: Suzie Hale, Title 1 Parent Coordinator |
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photos: Christa Gardner |
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Hats off (and wrists out)...Kudos to the students of the Greenfield Middle School whose Student Council is selling wrist bracelets that say "Courage, Love, Hope, Strength, Life, Survive" as a fundraiser for the many faculty and staff at GMS who are dealing with the diagnosis of cancer and the medical treatment modalities and emotional aspects that go with it. They're perfect for everyone participating in the Relay for Life. The idea for wrist bracelets came from council members and the student population at large, who wanted to do something to show teachers and staff they care. These glow-in-the-dark bracelets are stretchy and therefore need no clasp! They are powder blue in color but when they glow in the dark, they turn a light green. |
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ALL money raised from the sale of these bracelets will be donated to a cancer-related organization. GMS student council members will be voting on which organization to support at their meeting on Tuesday, May 2. Bracelets cost $1.00 and can be purchased from Jane Smith, GMS Student Council Advisor (jsmith@gpsk12.org). Make checks payable to GMS Student Council. If you have questions, please contact Jane at 772-1360, X2. Thank you for your support! |
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Program helps improve readingSunday, April 30, 2006By BETSY CALVERT GREENFIELD - A dramatic change this year in the school district's reading program is paying off, with equally dramatic improvements in literacy by children who might otherwise have been labeled as struggling, according to administrators. With high levels of poverty and sagging test scores in its Massachusetts Curriculum Assessment System exams, the district was among many in the state eligible for state and federal grant money for special reading programs. It started last summer with a $33,000 grant to Newton Elementary School, a school with a high poverty rate. That grew to $57,000 by September. By January, Newton was receiving another $118,000 and the $53,000 was switched to North Parish Elementary School. "There's great things going on," said Susan Kazeroid, implementation facilitator with the state Department of Education. The federal Reading First program is working well across the state, since its been out for about four years, Kazeroid said, but Greenfield's program at Newton is working particularly well. "In Greenfield, their principal and their reading specialist are really good leaders and that helps," Kazeroid said of Principal Mary Lou Dibella and reading specialist Ruth Odom. "And their staff is really knowledgeable, and they're really open to what's good for the kids." At recent School Committee meetings, Superintendent Joseph Ruscio has touted the success of the new reading program at elementary schools throughout the district. Last summer, Greenfield teachers and administrators were presented with the requirement that they learn an extensive and intricate reading program created by federally funded educational experts. Part of President George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" education mandate, the Reading First curriculum is an attempt to make literacy instruction more controlled and closer to foolproof. It is designed to level the playing field between poor districts with limited parental involvement and wealthy districts with extensive parental involvement. "This really is the answer today to solving reading problems," Dibella said. "It's all research based." Locally, she said, many teachers were not thrilled to be handed this vast, new program at the beginning. "They hated it at first," she said. "These programs are very packaged, very timed. The creative piece kind of comes later, as you become more familiar. "As they started implementing it, and seeing the changes, they started liking it," she said. Second-grade teacher Carlene Iacuessa, who has 22 years experience, said she is impressed with the program. "The progress with the kids this year has been just amazing," she said. Of children at the lowest reading levels, she said, "Those kids have just skyrocketed." Second-grader Jasmine Gomez was working independently at a headphone station recently. Independent work combined with small group work is the hallmark of Reading First. She explained she was doing "word work." "It means a center that you go to when you're doing words and you have two spelling words and selection words, two poems, 10 important sentences, word searching, daily fix-its and the leveled reading," Jasmine said. Asked what was her favorite, she said, "I would have to say the word search. You get to find works that are mostly hard to find, but you find all of them." She also likes the leveled readings, which are small books put out by the publisher geared toward specific reading levels. Newton has been charting the progress of each child in each grade every six weeks on basic literacy indicators, Dibella said, and that's where the proof lies at this point. She points to a chart on the wall with the mysterious title, "phoneme segmentation fluency," for the third grade. Research shows that this particular indicator, which measures whether children can put sounds together, is the main predictor of who will become a competent reader, Dibella said. Without fluency, children never learn to comprehend or enjoy reading, she said. For the third grade in September, 14 of 20 students were in the high risk group in this area. By March, the number was zero in high and moderate risk, Dibella said. It is not unusual in any school, she said, for those charts to show no improvement throughout a school year, so such changes are indeed dramatic. Other charts on the wall showed similar shifts in other literacy skills. "This is what we are so pleased with," she said. Dibella, who started this year as principal, credits much of the progress to the meetings staff have every six weeks at which they look at the most recent set of scores from the students for each grade. The staff then figure out the best strategy for each child for the next six weeks. At Newton, the new grant money is going toward the hiring of the reading specialist plus reading aids. With these teaching assistants, children needing extra help can spend an extra hour on reading every day. ©2006 The Republican © 2006 MassLive.com All Rights Reserved. |
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GREENFIELD — Children's early reading skills at Newton School have improved so dramatically, thanks to new reading initiatives this fall, that the school has been awarded a multi-year, $118,400 "Reading First" federal grant to help in its goal to help all students become proficient readers. "We're going to have readers," Principal Mary Lou DiBella proclaimed. "They're all going to be reading by third grade. We've also brought fourth and fifth grades into the fold." In the fall, the school received a $33,000 BayState Readers grant to help build children's reading skills, and was the only school in the state to have its reading grant expanded to the fullest amount available, DiBella said. Also, all the teachers have voluntarily been taking a lengthy, online VoyagerU course that focuses on five components of reading. "We have used this money to hire staff," said DiBella. "We have a literacy coach that works with all the teachers, and there is data collection (on children's progress). We're going to be doing a summer program, as well as professional (teacher) development," she said. Since September, the school has offered 2½-hour English language arts sessions, and pupils' scores on a series of tests to measure their reading skills, called "Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills," have shown much improvement. Children's ability to recognize letters of the alphabet and phonetic letter combinations is often a good predictor of the child's later reading achievement, DiBella said. And fluent readers tend to do better in all other areas of study. To monitor their early reading skills, children in grades kindergarten through Grade 3 are screened three times a year. They are given four short assessments, with each taking about a minute. They look at how automatic recognition skills are for the students. For instance, at the start of the school year, nearly 15 out of 20 first-graders needed help in recognizing the separate vowel and consonant sounds in a word like "cat." By March, all could recognize the sounds without a teacher's help or intervention. "Nonsense word fluency" tests a child's knowledge of the relationship between letters and sounds by providing made-up words that children sound out. In this test, 15 out of 20 second-graders had to be helped to sound out such "words," but by March, all but one or two students could do it on their own. DiBella said results for third grade were less dramatic, probably because some of the school's new reading initiatives weren't in use when they were first learning to read. "So, with the third grade, we know we need to work smarter," she said. However, because of the frequent monitoring, teachers are becoming adept at adjusting their teaching to the students' needs. The English periods include 20-minute lessons with the teacher, then breaking up into small reading groups of students and the chance for them to get individual help. DiBella said the teachers teach to the students' abilities. "We don't teach to the middle anymore — where you're bored because you're bright, or you're bored because you need more help," DiBella said. About 70 percent of the 192 students come from low-income families, says DiBella, and low-income children are more likely to be poorer readers than children from wealthier families. It doesn't have to be that way, she said. "It's my passion, that these children achieve at the highest levels of the community," she said. "We know, if they're reading by third grade, anything's possible." You can reach Diane Broncaccio at: dbronc@recorder.com or (413) 772-0261, Ext. 277. |
Page last updated: April 16, 2007
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