Bryant School New Books

Children at Bryant love their new books and send a Thank You to the AACC!!

Over the last 10 years, state funding cuts have had a massive (negative) impact on Michigan schools, including Bryant and Pattengill. Michigan now ranks 50th out of all states in funding increases over the past ten years. Essentially, we never recovered from the deep cuts to funding that began in 2008. Because of this, there are many needed resources and materials that would benefit schools like Bryant and Pattengill, including books to teach lessons/units in reading workshop and writing workshop.

In reading workshop and writing workshop, teachers use mentor texts to model reading and writing strategies for students. Each text is used to teach a unit and/or lesson and is critical to effective instruction. Many teachers make due by finding copies from libraries (although this means you have teachers across 20 elementary schools attempting to locate and check out the same books) or have to make substitutions with the books that they have.

This has been a source of anxiety and frustration for teachers because they often don’t have the texts they need to teach the units, and it’s often challenging and time consuming to find the right resources.

These reading and writing workshop text sets provide books for each unit of reading workshop and writing workshop at each grade level. While teachers in the grade level will share the resources (each grade level got one set of reading workshop texts that span the year and one set of writing workshop texts that span the year), teachers now have immediate access at school to books they need to teach their lessons/units.

No more trekking to the library in hopes that a copy of the book they need is still available! No more substituting lower-quality texts because that’s what’s available!

Because these texts will be used in all classrooms to teach the general reading and writing curriculum, this purchase and these resources will impact every teacher and every student in each building.

The purchase of leveled text sets for special education instruction was sorely needed. Special education teachers at Bryant, who provide tailored and individualized instruction to each student they serve, did not have their own sets of high-quality texts to teach students at all different levels, abilities, ages, and grades. Before receiving the leveled text sets, our special education teachers were pulling texts from the bookroom, where students may have already seen or read the text with their classroom teacher, or printing out black and white booklets at the appropriate levels for their students.

Students in special education programming are the most fragile and staying engaged in reading, despite the difficulty, is often a challenge for many. These students are often the ones who need access to the most high-interest, engaging texts.

The new leveled text sets have provided our special education staff with resources to teach reading and writing skills using highly engaging and appealing texts at their students’ appropriate levels. The new leveled text sets also establish a separate set of texts for special education instruction, which ensures that students who are serviced through special education are not reading or encountering the same texts in the classroom as they do with their special education instructors.