Welches Elementary School teacher Julie Barrett can relate to what happens
in a book she uses in the classroom with her students.

In the book, a cat plays on a Christmas tree and loves it, but gets upset when
the holiday icon disappears.

She had a cat that also loved a Christmas tree, but ended up climbing it and
knocking it over.

In the classroom, she uses her experience to help show the connections she
makes as she reads. That skill, she notes, is not something that comes
naturally to all of us.

“That helps you understand; your brain is constantly thinking about what
you’re reading,” Barrett said. “A lot of times kids don’t realize that’s what they
need to do, they’re just reading the words.”

So once a day, Barrett and her three educational assistants work with
students struggling with reading for an intensive, half-hour session in small
reading groups. And while some of her students might not make their own
connections with the words they read, others are there for other reasons,
such as tracking the purpose of the sentence.

Barrett utilizes a variety of strategies to help her students, including a magic
book, where two strips of paper with words are put together and then folded
to make different combinations and connections.

Another one of her classroom tools is “reader’s theater,” where students
practice reading a story numerous times before reading it out loud in front of
a group. Barrett even performed an action research project through Concordia
College with her students using the tool and found that their reading scores
jumped.

She stresses that if parents can expose their children to books at an early
age, it is more beneficial. That can also include singing, nursery rhymes and
other word games to stimulate a child’s mind.

Barrett works with the other teachers in the school to connect with what
students are learning elsewhere, but due to budget cutbacks, she now only
helps the students who need help with reading most, rather than the entire
student body. But the job is rewarding when she’s able to help a child develop
reading skills.

“It’s delightful,” Barrett said. “I may not make a big splash in the whole world,
but I’ll make a splash in a kid’s life.”

Down the hall, Denise Emmerling-Baker helps elementary and middle school
students with English Language Development, including approximately 30
students with Spanish, Lithuanian and Creole backgrounds.

She sees many students struggle with learning English because they often feel
so far behind in the typical classroom. So for 30 minutes a day, she works
with them on grammar, vocabulary, punctuation and even computer skills.

And she encourages them to continue speaking in their native language at
home and discuss what they’re learning in school. Hopefully, both English and
their native languages will be equally strong at the end of their education.

“They often feel behind because English is their second language, but by the
end of high school, we wish all kids were bi-literate,” Emmerling-Baker said.

“If they can keep learning both languages at home ... it really does help.”
Emmerling-Baker also uses a variety of projects to help her students learn the
intricacies of English, including poems and a “Thankful Hands” project for
Thanksgiving to illustrate the suffix “ful.”

“If we can teach suffixes, prefixes and root words, they can learn a lot of
English,” she noted.

For Christmas, students worked with the future tense by discussing how to
make their parents proud and created dodecahedron ornaments featuring
words of the season (such as “peace” and “joy”) in English and their native
language.

Of course, for those students who work with both teachers, they get two
lessons in one.

“Julie and I try to discuss what books would be best for some of our joint
students and what homework to send home,” Emmerling-Baker said. “We are
really, all of us, keen on what works for the classroom teacher.”