Member Testimonials

Read more about what current members are saying on the
Minnesota Reading Corps blog

These stories were contributed by 2007-08 Minnesota Reading Corps members.

Today one of the 2nd grade teachers thanked me for working with her student. She said he's always so excited when he gets back to class and he wants to tell her how well he has done. He got his best score today and he was so proud of himself. His teacher said that she was seeing a good change in him because of my tutoring.

I just wanted to share the good news with all of you! My co-teacher and I feel very proud and excited because 90% of the children in our classroom that will be attending kindergarten in the fall will be leaving our Head Start classroom ready for kindergarten. Just watching their daily interactions with each other helps to build our confidence in contributing to their success and the celebration of their abilities and capabilities on their improved IGDI scores. They are reading, talking and writing all day long and enjoying it. This has been a great year to learn something new!

My amazing story is about a boy who is 3 years old. When he first started school he didn't know any English at all. Today he knows how to write and say all of the letters. He can count up to 29, knows all of the basic shapes and knows all of the colors. He is now starting to talk to other children and the teachers. He is repeating me when we go through our picture naming cards (ex. butterfly or ice cream). We are now currently working on letter sounds.

One of my volunteers discovered that none of her 3rd grade students did any reading at home. The volunteer encouraged the children to find someone at home with whom they could practice their reading. After a while, the volunteer noticed that one of the girls was making good progress and seemed more confident. She asked the girl if she had been practicing. The girl said that she had taken the volunteer's advice and was now reading with her grandmother on weekends.

I have been tutoring a second grade student for eight weeks. There was not significant progress, though I tried several different interventions. Her probes stayed in the 70's. Finally, I sent a letter home to her parents explaining how I had been working with their child, her reading goal, and her current reading scores. I asked for their help in having their child read aloud to them and asked them to time her for one minute. A few days after sending the letter home, this particular second grader came back and said her father had timed her the previous night. Her probe score that day jumped to the 80's. What a difference parent involvement can make in a child's progress! Though generally students have made significant progress, this particular student needed that extra boost from her parent to get her over the hump.

Today I was working with Samantha when she told me that she had played school over the weekend. She said that she practiced reading two books while doing this. I asked her if she was playing teacher, and she said, "No, I was playing volunteer." That comment really struck me because it tells me the incredible impact and visibility that volunteers have on kids. What a great person for Samantha to pretend to be!

I started tutoring a 2nd grade student this week who is reading at a pretty low level. He gets really excited when I come to read with him, he has so much enthusiasm. In the passage we were reading the first line was: "I am so happy!" Right after my student read this line he stopped and said I love that line, I am so happy! After our second reading of repeated reading there was a fire alarm. We were not far from the class so we followed behind the class. When we were outside in line my student asked if we could sit on the ground and continue reading because he did not want to stop.

The kids at my site made cards and posters for people who have helped them during the year and put them up all over of the school. I was thinking to myself how nice they were as I made my way to my room. Once I arrived at my room, I had this huge poster on my door from some of the kids I have served. It made me feel good. Later that day each of the kids had personal card for me also!

I began working with one of the 2nd grade students beyond our regularly scheduled intervention time several weeks ago. I read with her before school and after our intervention time. When we started reading together, she was so sheepish about anyone hearing her read. Today she asked me if she could read the story we were using to read to her entire class! By now her confidence had increased so much that she actually WANTED to read aloud in front of others. It was soooo gratifying!

Anthony is an up and down student. I never knew what kind of score he would get from day to day. As soon as he got above his aimline, or close to it, he would suddenly drop low until we changed his intervention. By the end of the year he finally got in the 60s consistently. He never got higher, but I counted it a success that he stayed up there for many weeks. His teacher also told me that he made his personal goal on his spring MAP test!

As we celebrated the gifts of Green School volunteers who have given of their talent and time this year, it was meaningful to know that my investment in four of these volunteers had multiplied the benefits to our students. Their interest and positive attitude may result in the volunteers returning next year. As I prepare reports for our primary reading teachers meeting, the progress of all the students is apparent. An example is a young 2nd grade, ESL student who started at 36 wpm with 5 errors and exited the program with 100 wpm and 0 errors! He has the potential of reaching whatever goal he chooses. This could not have happened without the total effort of the team here at Green School. There is a drive to make all students reach their learning potential and develop critical thinking. I think anyone who makes an effort and follows the MRC guidelines will improve their own lives as they open the door to reading to students.

Since Cindy graduated from MRC, she always said she wanted to read with me again. Shortly after that, I made plans to read with her twice a week between school's ending and the after school reading program. We meet in the library and find a book. She loves reading to me. It's fun to see her improvement since I tutored her. One day when I wasn't at the library in time, she came and found me in my room and said, "Are we going to read today?"

Andrea is my Most Improved Student! She started out 7 weeks ago knowing 16 letters of the alphabet. After that, she quickly learned all the letters. We moved on to Phoneme Blending and it took her a few days to catch onto that, but once she did she was a whiz! We soon moved on to Phoneme Segmenting. In this intervention it only took her 1 day to catch on to the idea. After that she was very ambitious at wanting to do 10 pages of words in a day! Soon we were on to Word Blending and she did well with that too. We were doing that for only a short time before she graduated from MRC. Her teacher is still concerned about her, but I hope she will continue to use in class what she has learned, and soon catch up to the other 1st graders.

Cliché’s aside, appearances, I've found, are misleading, especially in the third grade, or so it seems. For the past several weeks, I have been working with one third grade boy who, when it comes to his daily intervention, is less than enthusiastic. To say that he's shy too would be an understatement; he's shy, but with a sort of I-don't-want-to-do-this passive aggression, or at least that is what I was able to decipher from the few verbal mumblings he's given me between shoulder shrugs and long sighs. So when I saw his mother coming my way during parent-teacher conferences, I was a little scared. Surely she was going to have an issue with the program. Surely the boy, trailing behind her, was finally reaping his revenge for making him read that same passage a fifth time in Repeated Reading. When they got closer, a huge unprecedented smile rippled his cheeks as his mother asked if I was the one that read with him. Much to my surprise, she thanked me and said that the boy also wanted to thank me for all of the reading improvements and confidence he's gained. I stumbled through some response and was truly surprised.

One of the students that I have been monitoring through monthly IGDIs is an ELL student. Daniel has progressed from “far from target” on three of the measures I've been assessing (picture naming, letter name, and alliteration) to “close to target” in each of these areas. In letter name he has gone from 1 correct in October to 12 correct in March. In picture name, he has gone up from 10 to 25 correct. I am amazed at his progress and very happy too!

One of my third grade boys pretends to be a “tough guy” and he acts like he's not invested. He always complained when I came to take him from class and refused to focus while we were working. But one day he realized how far he had come since we started. He finally saw how much progress he was making and things changed. He stopped complaining when I entered the room and he tried hard to accomplish the tasks I set forth for him. And then last month he actually asked if we could work together after school in addition to our work during the day. My jaw dropped and I was speechless. SUCCESS!!

One of my 2nd graders has never been that into what we are doing. He gets distracted and argues about the stories or about the mistakes that I have counted. I felt like I was fighting with him to do what we needed to do. I'd spoken on several occasions to his teacher and my internal coach because I didn't really know what to do with him.

Then, after a school break, he was suddenly cooperative. He even asked for a blank chart and some stories that he could practice on at home. I gave him several stories take home and he was very excited. He read really well that day, even correcting his mistakes before I could. I asked his teacher if she had talked to him about reading and his attitude. She replied that she hadn't done anything. She then went on to tell me that the student had shown her the practice readings and had asked if she would listen to him read. His teacher said that she didn't know what had happened, but to keep it up.

I was working on nonsense word fluency with a first grader. One of the words on the list was w i z . He says, "wiz. What does wiz mean?" I said, "Remember, these are not real words they are make believe words." He replies, "Wiz is a real word. My dog wizes all over the floor!"