Grover Cleveland Elementary on Chicago’s Northwest Side is a new Reading In Motion school in the 2010-11 school year that came on board as part of our expansion into the Chicago Pubic Schools’ Area 1.  And Jennifer Kogut is a new kindergarten teacher at Cleveland who was looking to hit the ground running and quickly get her students learning the fundamentals of reading.

Half a year into the new partnership, Kogut says it’s working out wonderfully.  Her students are engaged, love the Reading In Motion exercises and are making great progress in learning to read.  Cleveland Elementary is one of 15 schools in Area 1 that adopted Reading In Motion this school year.

Kogut, who’s 24, starts each day with fluency warm up, writing words on the board and reading them with the students, working on segmenting and blending sounds.  The students really enjoy it and “they get upset if they don’t get a turn,” Kogut says.

“The kids love Reading In Motion.  They know all the songs and they love the repetition of it and the movement,” she says.  “They’re only 5 years old, and I think we forget that sometimes in kindergarten.  But this really gets them excited about learning.”

Kogut attended training sessions with other Area 1 teachers just before the start of the school year that were hosted by Reading In Motion.  “That was a really big help, so we were prepared in the classroom and knew what we were getting into,” she says.  “Little (RIM Teaching Coach Little Tom Jackson) really helped in getting me started and getting me into the swing of things, especially with it being my first year.”

Kogut saw a dramatic improvement in test scores from the beginning of year to January.  “Most of the students came in not knowing any letters, now they all do.  My lowest student just learned all her letters this month, so that’s been a big improvement,” Kogut says.  “She didn’t know any letters starting out, not even the ones in her name.”

“Their reading skills are really improving,” she continued.  “Reading In Motion really helps your students master the skills they’re going to need going forward.”

Reading In Motion was featured on the NBC-5 News in Chicago in a story about our partnership with the South Shore Fine Arts Academy. The piece focused on our innovative use of music and drama to engage young students and get them reading at and above grade level, and included interviews with RIM Teaching Coach Little Tom Jackson and a kindergarten teacher he has worked with at the school.

Heather Polek, working with the Reading In Motion curriculum and with Little as a coach and guide, got her entire class up to grade-level benchmarks in reading last year. And this year she has some of her kindergarteners reading at the 2nd and 3rd grade level. As the NBC-5 anchor said in introducing the piece: "Incredible."

The clip can be seen on our home page and is also here on YouTube.    

Reading In Motion has produced a new video about our partnership with Schubert Elementary on Chicago's Northwest Side and a new kindergarten teacher there, Robin Raffel.  Ms. Raffel was a 4th- and 5th-grade teacher who was moved to kindergarten for the 2010-11 school year, an assignment she found out about just a few weeks before school was to start. She describes herself as devastated by the news, and totally unprepared to teach such young students.

But Schubert had adopted Reading In Motion and Ms. Raffel was sent to a training seminar hosted by RIM in August, and came out more confident about what she could accomplish this year.  With RIM's ongoing assistance throughout the school year, Ms. Raffel created an efficient and effective classroom and has her students excelling as they learn to read.

The relationship with Schubert and Ms. Raffel shows what can be accomplished with Reading In Motion's innovative teaching methods that use music and drama to engage students and get them reading up to and beyond grade level.  Please check out the video, which can be seen by clicking on the video tab above or on YouTube here.

Reading In Motion has received a $45,000 grant from the Chicago Tribune Charities - Holiday Campaign, a fund of the McCormick Foundation.  The grant is for advocacy and training of Chicago Public Schools teachers through Reading In Motion's Benchmarks reading program.

Benchmarks is a comprehensive arts-based reading program for kindergarten through third grade that was rigorously designed and tested during a five-year period that concluded in summer 2008.  Further, Benchmarks has incorporated new programmatic components to create a fully developed suite of services to provide higher levels of support and instruction to the children Reading In Motion serves.

The key to Benchmarks being a truly sustainable solution in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is teacher training and coaching by Reading In Motion staff.  Reading In Motion’s training for each teacher is a full two-year experience that begins with a three-day intensive institute during the summer of the first year.  This initial training is followed by a year of bi-weekly, in-classroom support, with Reading In Motion Coaches providing assistance in implementation, evaluation of student progress, and teaching strategies.  During the second year, our Coaches provide teachers with semimonthly, in-classroom support along with assessment.

Reading In Motion also has a Spanish Benchmarks program, launched in 2006-2007.  The Spanish version is an adaptation of our reading program for at-risk children, and is used in bilingual kindergarten and first grade classrooms in which Spanish-dominant students are taught to read in their native language before transitioning their reading skills into English.

The McCormick Foundation is a nonprofit organization committed to strengthening our free, democratic society by investing in children, communities and country. Through its six grantmaking programs, Cantigny Park and Golf, two museums, and a civic outreach program, the Foundation helps build a more active and engaged citizenry.  It was established as a charitable trust in 1955, upon the death of Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the longtime editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune. The McCormick Foundation is one of the nation’s largest charities, with more than $1 billion in assets.

In a letter featured in the Chicago Tribune, Reading In Motion Executive Director and co-founder Karl Androes makes the case that "it's possible for play and academics to work together for a child's success," and says he's witnessed it work in his years running RIM. The letter is in the Saturday, Sept. 11, edition of the newspaper and is in reaction to a front page piece titled "Kindergarten: It's the new 1st grade."

The story explored whether kindergarten has become too intensive for many students, with spontaneous play squeezed out by more traditional academic lessons. But Karl points out that RIM has found that young students can learn through play, in RIM's case through its music- and drama-based exercises. You can read Karl's letter here (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-vp-0911voicelettersbriefs-20100911,0,2455977.story) on the Tribune's web site - it's the second letter down - and here is a copy as well:

Play and academics

After 27 years of leading a nonprofit that partners with hundreds of Chicago schools, I agree with the researcher in "Kindergarten: It's the new 1st grade; Are today's youngest students smarter or are they pushed too hard?" (Page 1, Sept. 5) that we should question the idea that play and academics are at odds — in kindergarten or any grade. My experience says it's possible for play and academics to work together for a child's success. And I have proof.

In 2004 the organization I run set out to see if this was true. We found four schools in Chicago that were remarkably similar on six criteria, including high poverty levels and low scores on state of Illinois reading tests by the time their kindergartners reached third grade. Then kindergartners in two of those schools received our music-based reading curriculum for a year. The other two schools' kindergartners got the standard curriculum for kindergarten.

The results? While just 17 percent of students in the "standard curriculum" schools were reading at grade level by the end of kindergarten, fully 75 percent of students in the "music-based" schools were reading at grade level by year's end. More remarkably three years later at the end of third grade, fully three times as many in the arts-based group were still reading at grade level — 60 percent versus a sobering 19 percent of students in the non-arts group.

When kindergartners sing "The sounds are cuh-uh-puh in CUP," is that play or academics? Either way they are practicing a key pre-reading skill: breaking spoken words into their individual sounds. We've found children love this activity. Whether they know it or not, they are learning too.

— Karl Androes, executive director, Reading In Motion, Chicago

Reading In Motion's Back-to-School Beach Event brought staff, board members, friends and supporters out to Chicago's famous Oak Street Beach on a beautiful September evening.  The event included music by the band Fatbook, good food and good drinks, and fabulous views of Lake Michigan and the city skyline.  And it was all for a good cause: raising money for and awareness of the vital need to teach at-risk children to read and give them a shot at better lives.  Check out some photos of the event here, and thanks to everyone who attended. 

Reading In Motion is bringing its innovative arts-based reading programs to 15 schools on Chicago’s Northwest Side for the 2010-11 school year as part of a partnership with the Chicago Public Schools.  The expansion into kindergarten and first grade classrooms in CPS’ Area 1 means RIM will be in about 25 elementary schools throughout Chicago this school year, delivering its unique curriculum that uses music and drama to engage at-risk students and help them achieve grade-level reading.

“We’re thrilled to be partnering with the Chicago Pubic Schools on this expansion.  I think it’s recognition of the hard work we’ve done in creating our arts-based curriculum and the positive results we consistently see in our students,” said RIM Executive Director Karl Androes.  “This will mean hope and opportunity for hundreds more at-risk children who will have a better shot at reaching grade level reading in the crucial early academic years.”

The Area 1 partnership will involve RIM’s kindergarten Benchmarks program in nine schools and the Extra Dosage program – for first graders who need an ‘extra dose’ of instruction – in six other schools.  RIM will also host workshops for K-1st teachers in all of the remaining Area 1 schools.  RIM coaches and program staff led workshops for kindergarten teachers in nine participating schools this summer to train them in RIM’s methods, and will provide bi-weekly support for each teacher in those schools throughout the year.  In addition, Extra Dosage instructors will be inserted in all first grade classrooms in six other schools to implement additional small groups daily, thereby doubling instructional time for students who need it most.

Two significant goals of the teacher workshops were to get teachers excited about maximizing their amount of instructional time each day, and making teachers' instruction the highest quality possible - engaging and full of rich opportunities to practice skills and get immediate feedback.  The overall project goal is that, in participating schools, the percent of students reading at grade level at the end of kindergarten and first grade increases each year until it reaches 100%.

RIM is in close to 120 classrooms throughout Chicago and has helped tens of thousands of students gain critical reading skills since it was founded in 1983.  RIM has commissioned several assessments of its work over the years and the results have shown significant and consistent reading gains by students exposed to the program. The most recent study tracked students for four years and found that students who were in Reading In Motion classrooms from kindergarten to third grade were three times as likely to be reading at grade level at the end of third grade compared to closely matched control group classrooms who had not had Reading In Motion.

“Through these studies and our classroom experience over the years we have learned that young students are engaged by music and movement, and better able to pick up the literacy skills they’ll need as they move on in school and life,” Androes said.

The suburban Chicago restaurant Francesca's Tavola will be donating 20% of each and every bill on Tuesday, August 24, to Reading In Motion whenever RIM is mentioned.  The donations at the Italian restaurant in Arlington Heights apply for lunch and dinner (11:30 a.m. - 9 p.m.), for dine in and carry out, and for food and drinks.  But patrons must mention they are there on behalf of RIM!

Reading In Motion Board member Aaron Mikulsky organized the fundraising initiative.  Francesca's Tavola is located just south of the central business district in downtown Arlington Heights (208 S. Arlington Heights Rd., phone: 847-394-3950), within walking distance of the Arlington Heights Metra stop.  Parking is available in the lot just south of the restaurant; click here for driving directions, and here for the restaurant's web site.

Rebecca Brubaker, Senior Vice President, Manufacturing & Distribution for the Chicago Tribune, has been named Chair of the Board of Directors for Reading In Motion.  Ms. Brubaker has been a member of Reading In Motion’s Board of Directors since 2007, and was also on the board from 2002 to 2004 before she was transferred to the Daily Press in Newport News, VA.  She re-joined the board upon her return to Chicago.  In addition, RIM welcomes a new Board member, Sylvia Alston.

Reading In Motion is being piloted in some kindergarten classrooms in Utah thanks to a partnership with ArtsBridge America and Utah State University, and participants in Utah have put together an excellent video about the collaboration. It's highly complimentary of the RIM program and what it has accomplished: getting kids engaged in literacy and improving their reading skills. The first part of the video can be seen here, and the second part here.

Reading In Motion focuses its literacy programs on young students, kindergarten through third grade, with the belief that children who can't read at grade level by the end of third grade will likely struggle with literacy throughout their lives. A Annie E. Casey Foundation study that came out this week on the importance of getting students reading at grade level by the end of third grade goes hand-in-hand with RIM's guiding principle. "Until third grade, children are learning to read. After third grade, they also are reading to learn. When kids are not reading by fourth grade, they almost certainly get on a glide path to poverty," said Ralph Smith, Executive Vice President of the Casey Foundation. To read more about the study, click here.