June 17, 2024 - It's the first day of summer break for teachers and usually this day is reserved for teachers and other school staff to begin to relax and unwind from the year-long work of preparing students for the next grade level. But not for the dedicated elementary teaching staff from the Klamath Falls City Schools. Elementary classroom teachers, paraprofessionals, and administrators met together to learn the Science of Reading covering the latest research on how we can best teach children to read. Science of Reading expert Sasha Borenstein worked with elementary staff from the Klamath Falls City Schools for two days, teaching them the research behind the Science of Reading, and practicing with elementary staff how to teach children to read using the strategies that are shown to make a difference with students. All of this training is in preparation for using the new district-adopted materials for teaching reading. At the May board meeting, the Klamath Falls City Schools Board of Directors unanimously voted to adopt Bookworms and the University of Florida Literacy Institute Foundations materials for teaching reading in our elementary schools. Both of these materials are aligned with the Science of Reading research and are shown to work with student populations similar to the students in the Klamath Falls City Schools.
Gone are the days when students were taught to guess at words, use pictures to figure out words, or skip words if they do not know them. Instead elementary students in the Klamath Falls City Schools will be taught to read by learning the sounds each letter makes and combining sounds together to make words. Students will be explicitly taught to read words through phonological awareness, decoding, and developing a large sight word bank of common words. Students will be explicitly taught to understand what they read by developing a large background knowledge of words and their meanings, increasing student knowledge of different vocabulary words, learning verbal reasoning skills such as inferencing and metaphors, and learning different text structures such as syntax, semantics, and different genres including both fiction, non-fiction texts.
The elementary staff from the Klamath Falls City Schools will part with more of their summer vacation in August when they will continue learning about the Science of Reading. The training from Sasha Borenstein will continue before school resumes for the 2024-2025 school year. All this work is being done so teachers are prepared to use the new reading curricula and teach the elementary students from the Klamath Falls City Schools to read using the latest research-based techniques.
