Versatile literacy program finds a home at SIS

The Saipan International School has found the “Achieve 3000”—a literacy-building and differentiated instruction program—to be a success in the classroom since they began using it this year.

Data provided to Saipan Tribune shows exceptional lexile, or reading levels, among SIS students. Achieve comes on top of another reading program called Accelerated Reader, which students have used to spur reading proficiency at SIS over the last six years.

Achieve is different from the AR program in that it develops independent reading and synthesizing skills for nonfiction material, like newspaper or science articles. The AR program focuses mostly on fiction, like Harry Potter books.

Mount Carmel School was reported to take on Achieve this year as well.

SIS headmaster Tim Bray said through the help of the Public School System, they have access to programs “that we wouldn’t have been able to afford.”

Achieve 3000 is one of these programs. According to Bray, SIS acts like an “incubator” for this program, which is relatively new to the island. The program aims to achieve the often-preached Common Core standards of “College and Career Readiness.”

At SIS, 22 students have met or exceeded their grade lexile ranges. Five of these students have levels at senior or past high school levels. Two of these top students turn out to be freshmen in high school and a seventh grader.

Freshmen Noa Bunts-Andersen, for one, has a lexile level of 1590L, while the range for senior readers is at 1215L to 1355L. She began the year at 1425L.

The seventh grader has a lexile score of 1575L, from a score of 1250L earlier in the year.

Middle school teacher Mackenzie Hemple and elementary teacher Amie McRoberts believe that students find it exciting because “they can go to it themselves.”

“The articles are at a level that they can read,” McRoberts said. “A lot of ESL kids look at a science textbook and can’t read it at all. But because [Achieve] puts the article at their level, they are getting the same information as everybody else in class, but it’s coming to them at their level.”

The program continues the growth in depth of content. Hemple said they have read topics from population growth in China, to geothermal and plate tectonics, to culture in Pacific islands.

“You can see each month their levels going up and it’s extremely fascinating,” said Hemple. “The kids love to see it.”

She said students are constantly going to the backwall where their point gains are posted up, to see how far they’ve gotten. Hemple does not post their lexile levels.

She said students have taken to certain topics and read up on them later, and notices growth in their comments and analysis. Hemple has one class devoted a week to Achieve.

Noa Bunts-Andersen feels her “critical thinking” skills growing with the work she has done through the program.

“I like the stories that we use because they are real life stories and they are constantly new and updated to what’s actually going on [in the world]. And unlike most tests that we take, it actually changes to match your level,” she said.

Another top Achieve student, Emily Frink, described the AR program, as “about the book” but for Achieve it is “understanding what the article is talking about.”

“I think in English class, in general, you have been doing this your whole life, so when you get to Achieve 3000 it’s just combining it all together,” Frink said.

According to Bray, there has been a big move with the Common Core, for college and career readiness, because of this; Achieve’s lexile system was based solely on nonfiction reading material.

“What’s the thing you read most of in college? Unless you’re a literature major, you spend most of the time reading nonfiction,” Bray, adding that this is the same for the workplace.

“The whole program itself is based on asking a question ahead of time. And then learning how to summarize, learning how to paraphrase…key skills in regards to reading. And then asking some basic comprehension questions, with these questions getting more sophisticated as students get better at their reading level,” he said.

The whole idea of the program is for students to go to college or the workplace with the reading skills to be successful in the areas, he said.

The program can automatically generate two articles every week, with assignments and activities for these articles. But a teacher can also go in and build a lesson plan around an article, Bray said, making it a versatile “bonus” to teachers with limited time.

“Elementary teachers don’t usually have a lot of prep periods—they are spending their time with students—so it’s tough to have extra time to read through 20 articles to find the article that works. Instead [with Achieve] you can get an article and automatically jump into a lesson.”