BY ALANA CALIGIURI (’09)
The Loras for Literacy (LFL) program has had a busy, innovative year as it helped several elementary schools within the Dubuque community provide an interactive learning environment to students. In 2005, LFL received a $366,000 grant from the Verizon Foundation, a company committed to being America’s literacy champion by increasing community awareness and creating additional funding and support of literacy programs for adults, children and families. These funds have recently helped the LFL program provide the third-grade classroom at Holy Ghost Elementary School with 21 ThinkPad laptops, a laser printer, LCD projector and an innovative system called mimio Interactive + Capture.
The mimio system can transform the standard classroom dry erase board by connecting directly with the teacher’s computer and projector, which allows the teacher to control the computer’s desktop applications directly from the board using the mimio pen as a cordless mouse. Students are then able to create and write stories, play interactive games for reading comprehension and practice cursive handwriting. When finished with their collaborative projects they can save everything created on the whiteboard back to the computer.
“The mimio is a great technology-based teaching tool,” said Carrie Massey-Watters, third grade teacher at Holy Ghost. “The students are highly involved in learning and think they’re playing with a video game. It’s high interest for both my students and me.”
The LFL program has also been engaged with Holy Ghost’s fourth- and fifth-grade students through after-school literature circles. These literature circles were facilitated by Loras College students to help provide young learners with the opportunity to read well-known novels of interest and discuss their understandings of the readings. Learners also participated in arts and crafts as an extracurricular activity that related to the novels.
In addition, the LFL program and Loras students have aided St. Anthony School with an after-school tutoring program and offered assistance to Lincoln Elementary with an online, award-winning reading program called Headsprout.
However, the list of assistance still goes on. To add to the program’s productive year, LFL sponsored training for Holy Family school teachers on the Verizon Foundation’s Thinkfinity Web site on Feb. 18, 2008, at Mazzuchelli Middle School. Thinkfinity is a free online resource for teachers, students, parents and the literacy community that is designed to improve educational and literacy success by providing quality content and professional development. At the in-service training teachers learned how to effectively navigate more than 55,000 educational and literacy resources available on the Thinkfinity site. The teachers specifically learned how to find lesson plans on the site, how to implement those lessons into their classrooms and to utilize the assessment instruments available.
After examining Loras for Literacy’s busy year it is evident that the program lives up to its objective of striving to help educate future early childhood and elementary teachers, as well as current teachers, to be better prepared in teaching basic literacy skills to all children. The program has also shown that it truly does focus on better preparation in working with diverse learners and those who are struggling as readers.
Vist Loras for Literacy online at http://depts.loras.edu/lorasforliteracy/.
