2005 CORNERSTONE/BRITISH EXCHANGE
WE HAVE THE DATES!!

"New" Cornerstone school coaches and principals are preparing to take part in a week of exchange with our British colleague schools in greater London.

Our traveling team will leave the U.S. on Friday evening, April 8, and will conclude their week in the London schools on Friday, April 15. Unless you schedule an extended "personal vacation," returning flights to the United States will depart on Saturday morning, April 16. Contact Antoine Jones in the Cornerstone Philadelphia office if you have questions.

Download the Cornerstone Literacy Framework
and take the disk to Kinkos for a life-size version for your wall
It's Fast and Easy!

On the Cornerstone website, www.cornerstoneliteracy.org, you can easily download the Cornerstone Literacy Framework, so that you can have it blown up into the large poster size version for your faculty's reference use.

  • Go to our homepage (www.cornerstoneliteracy.org)
  • Down the left-hand menu column, click on "Literacy Framework"
  • Find column entitled "Print" and scroll down to "Download poster." Just below
    that click on "Teaching Intentions" and/or "Learning Outcomes"
  • When the poster opens up on the screen, take the usual steps to save the document
    to a disk
  • Take the disk to your local Kinko's and have it run on "poster-size paper"
  • The cost will run approximately $13 each.
  • Post in your faculty/Cornerstone room for easy referral!


"IDEAS-------IDEAS-------IDEAS"

What's Happening in Cornerstone Parent Work
Southern Regional Meeting Notes - February 6-8, 2005


The Horry County parent representatives met at the 2005 Southern Regional Meeting and shared the work they are doing in each of their schools and made plans for taking the work of the Regional Meeting back to their schools

South Conway Elementary School (Cecilia Tacket)
Current Activites

  • Most recent event was a very successful Movie Night. The school showed a movie on a big screen, had soft blankets to lie down on and volunteer parents serve popcorn and hot chocolate. Parents watched their own children. It was great fun for all, including Cecelia who got to participate as a parent while other volunteers served the popcorn
  • The center sponsors numerous workshops, including a monthly storytime for parents and young children. During Storytime three things happen - telling stories, craft activities, and a snack.
  • Many types of Parent Support Groups are offered at the Center: a stay at home parents network, ADHD parents support group, divorced parents support groups, foster parents support group. These groups have very good participation levels, in large part due to Cecelia's one-on-one personal relationships with the parents and her own participation in those groups which are appropriate for her.
  • A monthly CSI for Parents (based on Comprehension Strategies Institute done for staff during summer) takes place where staff members share information, books and activities to help parents learn about literacy strategies. These have gone extremely well (See letter from Janet Calder in this newsletter [February 2005]).
  • An evening Bingo for Books event for children to win books was held while parents participated in teacher led learning activities, approximately 200 parents attended and everybody took home a book.
  • South Conway has 645 students and about half the parents participate in some kinds of activities.
  • At times Cecelia rides the bus with the children and meets parents at their own homes, helps with homework on the bus

New ideas to take away:

  • Use Cornerstone Corner in the newsletter to point out "things to look for this month".
  • Model some possible one-on-one strategies for parents and children to do at home while meeting with children or parents in the resource center, invite parents in as a follow-up, provide books on tape.
  • Has a child in the honor's program and will try applying the questions from the session on Bloom's taxonomy to push that child's thinking.

Waccamaw Elementary (Renee Hill and Valeria Colbert)
Current activities

  • Bingo for Books was a way to motivate parents to come out. The bingo activities were meant for younger children, but more than 90 children attended including many older children who came out and asked for chapter books. During the Bingo for Books information sessions were held for parents. These were 15 minute sessions where parents rotated through classrooms and learned about terms such as schema, as well as had a meeting with the principal. Pizza was served pizza, due to the larger than expected turn-out the pizza ran out. There have been many requests for a repeat event.
  • The PTO Board has grade level parent reps who coordinate with the room mother for each classroom|
  • Hard Work Café homework reward program. Every 9 weeks students get goodie bags if they've done 90% of their homework. Numbers have increased from 140 students to 450 children receiving rewards and the school is considering raising the requirements for the rewards. Parents get involved in the homework to help get the goodie bag.
  • Book-Talk: a book study of 7 Keys to Comprehension has involved 4-6 parents. Participants may be able to lead comprehension strategy activities for other parents in the future.
  • Monthly calendar of homework for young children (K) includes assignments such as parent write a paragraph, child draw a picture
  • A Donuts for Dads event is planned. Copies of the book What Do Daddies Do? have been purchased. The plan is for each parent/child pair to write a story while eating donuts and to take home a book and a toy. A similar Muffins for Moms event is planned with the book If You Give a Moose a Muffin.
  • Wall alongside the Cornerstone room posts monthly history of parent activities.
  • Renee had to learn terminology (schema, metacognitive) when her children came home using it. Some parents have come out to literacy events as a result of this type of experience in order to help with homework.
  • Open house to meet child's teacher.
  • Teachers often send letters home about parent/child homework (such as Everyday Math).

New ideas to take away

  • Likes the idea of riding the bus with children, helping with homework and meeting parents.
  • Newsletter format for a parent newsletter is ready to go. Consider asking parents to write up good literacy practices they do at home, beginning with Renee, who is also the PTA president, a Child Development Aide and a parent of two children at Waccamaw Elementary. Renee shared a practice she does with her two sons -each child has a journal where they write daily and their parents respond.
  • Will try some of the ideas shared in the writing assessment workshop with a son who is struggling with writing.

North Myrtle Beach Elementary (Sheila Evans)
Current Activities

  • A Bingo for Books night (as done at South Conway and Waccamaw) is planned to motivate increased participation. Workshops will be planned to take place both during the daytime and in the evening.
  • School newsletter has "Cornerstone Connections" section
  • One-on-one outreach to local churches; team of teachers are prepared to go into community churches and make presentations at after-school tutorial programs
  • Volunteers involved in Reading Buddies and libraries, but not yet involved with Cornerstone
  • After-school intervention with at risk children, one-on-one outreach

New ideas to take away

  • Parent rep volunteers 1 day/week. As a result of this meeting, she would like to change the way that time is used to:
    • work with/read with individual struggling readers identified by teachers.
    • make herself available for a book group or to meet with individual parents on Wednesday afternoons.

Aynor Elementary School (Kathy Hucks)
Kathy is new to Cornerstone and appreciated the opportunity to meet other parents and to learn about Cornerstone. As a result of her questions we spent some time talking about reading aloud and some of the ways that reading aloud can be part of the Cornerstone parent activities in schools:

  • Parent leaders modeling reading aloud with their own children and sharing what they do with other parents.
  • Classroom teachers giving reading aloud and talking together homework assignments (we shared examples of teacher letters to families).
  • Family literacy events that include reading aloud.