LITERACY 2008

Linwood identified through its testing more students who needed remedial reading than it was able to fund teacher aides for.  This placed the organizer Judy Hutchison in the unenviable position of selecting who was helped and who missed out.

TOE BY TOE AT LINWOOD 2008

At the beginning of the year there were 62 Year 9 students below 77 on a BURT word recognition.  These are identified as needing remedial reading assistance ie Toe by Toe.  Another 11 students scored between 77 and 80. 

There were spaces for only 24 Year 9 students at the start of the year.

There were 7 Year 10 students and 16 Seniors, some finishing from the previous year but some were new to the school.

We had two tutors for the programme.  Both tutors elected to work with 4 students per hour to allow more students to be tutored.

The Seniors and new Year 10 students were picked up by Terry Elliott with Year 9 students to fill in any spare spaces she had as they became available. I took on 16 Year 9 students as one period a day (or one day per week) was set aside for developing and supporting the outposts.

This meant 38 Year 9s with serious to moderate reading delays were not able to be seen from the start of the year and any new students of any age who arrived with reading delays would probably not be seen.

The school was able to find a further 10 hours per week during the year and some of the Year 9s were picked up then. However some of the Year 9s had left the school before even getting on to the programme (some for behavioural reasons and some because of transience).  No doubt they will appear in the statistics at some later date.

Results continue to be good. One Senior girl who began the programme last year finished this year with a Probe 8.5 years better than her first in early 2007. Her BURT had increased by 52 raw score points.  Another improved by 4.5 years.  Most of the Year 9s will finish by the end of this term.  All show improvements so far.  One young man in Year 9 has had to be cajoled and coerced through the programme but at page 153 he finally admitted it has made a big difference to his reading and was able to acknowledge that he could now easily manage pages that he once found very difficult.  Attendance continues to be a challenge for some students but it is not as serious a problem as it seems to be at the YMCA and Te Ora Hou.