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June 7, 1999
Program brings success inreading at Redwood schoolsBy GUY PRIEL Journal Staff Writer REDWOOD FALLS -- Recent success of a two-year-old reading program at Redwood Area Schools has district officials looking for ways to improve and expand for the future. The program, which was implemented at Reede Gray Elementary School during the 1997-1998 school year with six students, is known as The Lindamood-Bell Reading Program. The program was started in the 1970s by speech therapists Charles Lindamood and Nanci Bell. They had conducted extensive research on two components needed for achievement in reading. They discovered that students who lacked phonemic awareness and concept imagery had difficulty reading without special assistance. Phonemic awareness is the ability to perceive the identity, number and order of sounds in words. Concept imagery is the ability to create a mental picture from oral or written languages. Based on their research, Lindamood and Bell developed the components of a special reading program. "It is estimated that about 20 percent of students experience some difficulty in reading," Reede Gray Elementary School Principal Schnobrich said. "We discovered the program a few years ago and so far there have been 18 centers established across the country." The program is not specific for small children, and it can work easily and successfully at all grade levels. "The program was started two years ago, but was implemented to a greater extent this year," she said. "With the Lindamood-Bell program there is a component called the LIPS program that works with the way words and letters sound and a component called VV that works with comprehension." Students are referred by their classroom teachers and are given a diagnostic test to determine their needs before they participate in the program. The test determines their level of listening comprehension, spelling, reading comprehension and basic reading skills. "With the test results we are able to design the program to meet the students' needs and helps us plan how to retest the students to determine their success," Coordinator Sandra Whited said. Whited works with the program for seven hours per day, where the program is divided into 10 one-half hour sessions, allowing 20 students to receive one-on-one instruction. "There are three assistants in the class and we have one special education teacher who is trained in the program," she said. "This year we had 35 students enrolled at different times throughout the year." The program is conducted as part of the district's Title I funding. "The students have to be able to work together in groups of two and they receive extensive therapy that helps them work on reading skills," Schnobrich said. "This program is not built around a standardized curriculum or based on a percentage. It is based on what average students should know at their current grade level, based on national research." In order to qualify for the program, students must be at least half a grade level below where they should be. "The entire program is based upon letters, sounds and the connections between them," Schnobrich said. It takes six months for a student to be enrolled in the program before a change is noticed, but the end result will be a total life-long change in their learning process. "This is a different way of learning, because the process uses cubes and other tactile methods to help the students learn," Schnobrich said. "This has been the first year the program has been conducted with this intensity. We can't lose any students." Superintendent Rick Ellingworth said that the district needed to develop some type of method of keeping track of the students who have been enrolled to see what types of differences the program was making. "We need to take a global look at this program and see how it can better be implemented in the future," he said. "The entire program is vertical and should cross the curriculum." Many students need additional practice in test-taking skills and the program might provide assistance with those skills as well. The plans for future expansion of the program include keeping Whited at seven hours per day and transferring three assistants into the program for six hours per day and expanding the program through the first, second, third and fourth grades. The district would be making an intense financial decision to keep the program going, but it would be a fundamental part of the summer school program offered by the district, Schnobrich said. "It is a data-driven program and we will probably need to take another look at Title I funding," Ellingworth said. "The overall goal is academic achievement."
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