GILROY
– A week-long district-wide event to promote the enjoyment of
reading and writing couldn’t have come at a better time for
Brownell Middle School.
GILROY – A week-long district-wide event to promote the enjoyment of reading and writing couldn’t have come at a better time for Brownell Middle School.
During “Love of Literacy Week” Nov. 18 through 22, the junior high, embattled with impending sanctions from the state for not meeting yearly student improvement goals, launched nine school-wide literacy contests and activities that ran into the Thanksgiving break.
A book drive to augment the number and quality of books within classroom libraries at Brownell capped off the successful string of activities.
“We thought we’d get 100 or maybe 150 books to put in the classroom libraries. We thought the book drive would get us on track for having good classroom libraries,” said Donna Mayle, Brownell’s site literacy facilitator and a 30-year teaching veteran.
Brownell students responded well beyond the expectations bringing more than 5,000 books to the school during Love of Literacy Week.
“We are so pleased. Parents and kids were arriving at 7 a.m. to drop off books every day,” Mayle said. “And the best part is, almost every single one of them is usable.”
What makes the books usable is the range of grade levels they cover, Mayle said. That range is important for Brownell since roughly half of its students read two levels below grade level.
Because Brownell students failed to improve their standardized test scores two years in a row, the school is subject to state intervention.
The most likely scenario is that educators from outside the district will visit early next year to make observations and conduct interviews. The group then would establish a list of directives the school is bound by law to implement.
“Love of Literacy Week” kicked off a number of reading and writing activities that will spill over into the rest of the school year to help Brownell rebound from its low standardized test results.
One of the activities, called Round Robin Reading, was especially popular with students and teachers, Mayle said.
Over five days, the first 10 to 15 minutes of every school period was spent reading the book “Holes” by Louis Sachar.
“Some of our students have never read a large book on their own. The idea was for students to see that they could get through a chapter book in a week,” Mayle explained.
The impact of the activity went beyond that goal, Mayle said.
“I’d hear teachers and students talking about the story outside of class. PE teachers and art teachers were volunteering to read in class. Our principal (Suzanne Damm) read to the students; she was so supportive. It was more of a success than we could have imagined,” Mayle said.
