ADMINISTRATOR AND TEACHER REACTIONS TO STORYWORKS
According to language arts coordinator Jones, CFISD teachers are “in love with Storyworks , and that hasn’t changed for over 10 years.”
Teachers and school-level ELA instructional specialists agree that Storyworks is highly engaging for their students. Courtney Ducharme, a third-grade ELA teacher at Walker Elementary School, likes that it is a magazine for children and is colorful and “very visually pleasing to kids. It’s much more interesting to look at than a regular online book.” Bianca Esparza, a fifth-grade teacher at Matzke Elementary who teaches both bilingual and general education classes, finds that the Storyworks articles are engaging in the sense that students “see themselves reflected” in the stories. Susan Bergholtz, the ELA instructional specialist at Matzke Elementary School and a former teacher in the district, likes the wide range of topics in the magazines, including both fiction and nonfiction. Ducharme appreciates the text and graphics features in the nonfiction articles. She also likes that it includes poetry, as she had been having a hard time finding examples of poetry appropriate for her students. Kim Dameron, the principal at Walker, especially likes the online features, which include the introductory videos, slideshows with audio and visual support for building knowledge and vocabulary, the availability of the same story at multiple reading levels, the text-to-speech option, and interactive activities and lessons. Cynthia Hancock, Walker’s ELA instructional specialist and a former teacher in the district, likes that the stories can be used effectively with struggling, on-level, and high-performing readers. IMPLEMENTING STORYWORKS CFISD initially implemented Storyworks in Grades 4 and 5 and the district’s use has increased over the years, next into Grade 3 with Storyworks 3 , and finally to Grade 2 with Storyworks 2 . The number of students using Storyworks in the district overall and within each elementary school has continued to grow. Since Storyworks became a hybrid print-and-digital program, teachers and instructional specialists at CFISD have been using the program in a variety of ways. Sometimes it’s used as the mentor text. For example, Ducharme presents a poem from a Storyworks magazine to her class on her Promethean interactive board. Then she and her students analyze the poem together and use the board’s markup and annotation tools to identify stanzas, lines, and rhyming words. When they’re done with the lesson, she prints out a copy for each student.
SCHOLASTIC STORYWORKS SUCCESS STORY: CYPRESS-FAIRBANKS INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT 5
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs