THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, January 13, 1997 TAG: 9701130037
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By DENISE WATSON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE LENGTH: 82 lines
Chad Lee didn't call schoolwork fun three years ago. Back then, class was boring and his grades were C's, D's and E's.
But that was before the 12-year-old Camelot Elementary School student began attending after-school tutoring sessions.
He's on the honor roll now and the tutoring is ``just fun,'' Chad said.
``We get to work in these books and we have to tell what the word is in the sentence. Like, `The cat --- away from the dog.' It's just fun.''
The program has been a blessing for his grandmother, too.
``It's helped them so much with their school work. . . . The program is the best thing that has happened to them,'' said Alice Lee.
The after-school program has been a big help to Camelot as a whole - it's one of the tools that helped boost Camelot's last Literacy Passport Test scores by 21.6 percentage points, the biggest jump in the city.
Next month, sixth-graders will take the annual LPT, a crucial exam Virginia students must pass to graduate from high school. Camelot principal Lillian Faulk said she doesn't feel any pressure to repeat last year's performance.
``We're looking at two separate groups of sixth-graders. We're going to be proud of their progress regardless,'' Faulk said.
``The students might tell you something different. They want to maintain that status set by the last group.''
The district overall showed improvement with its 1995-96 LPT scores, jumping from 62 to 69 percent of sixth-graders passing the exam. The increase was gratifying after the city's scores fell nearly 6 percentage points in the 1994-95 school year.
In response to the drop, the school system produced a test improvement booklet in September 1995 and required principals to devise improvement plans for their individual schools.
But Faulk and her staff had begun test improvement steps six years before, when Camelot's test scores were some of the lowest in the city.
Faulk had been principal for only about two weeks when she saw an article about the school's poor test scores. She took the article from class to class and challenged students to improve their scores. She talked to teachers, who began weekly mock tests and math and reading reviews.
Each class is now required to have a daily language or math word problem to prep students for problems on the test.
``Students would see word problems on the test and just go bonkers,'' said assistant principal Vince Jones. ``The daily exercises help them.''
Teachers have been using test-taking methods in class, such as having the students put the answers of a math test on a separate sheet of paper as required with standardized tests.
Language arts teacher Valery Valentine uses newspapers to help the students become accustomed to a testing format of the LPT in which words are omitted from a paragraph and students pick the correct missing words based on information provided in the rest of the text. Students look for words in the news pages and pick the clues in the sentence that help identify the words. Valentine also has ``front-page scavenger hunts'' where students find and circle 10 words they haven't seen before or find synonyms for words they know.
This is in addition to daily writing assignments and picture novels the students make to summarize a story with words and pictures. All of the activities are designed to hone the translation, correlation and essay-writing skills that are needed for the LPT.
``Everything they write is preparing them for the Literacy Passport Test,'' Valentine said.
``Persuasive writing, narrative, descriptive, technical writing - we try to cover all of it.''
Jones said part of the school's success comes from the work in between the word problems and daily journals - pats on the back through quarterly awards assemblies, and motivational poems, such as Langston Hughes' ``Dream Keeper,'' pinned on the walls.
``You have to give the students encouragement, they try so hard,'' Jones said. ``One thing I try to tell them is, `No one can do everything, but everyone can do something.' '' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
CAMELOT ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
MORT FRYMAN
The Virginian-Pilot
Travia Dawson, a sixth-grader at Camelot Elementary School in
Chesapeake, works on a writing exercise that is part of a schoolwide
effort to improve students' test scores.
KEYWORDS: EDUCATION TUTORING