Daniella Villarreal and Raquel Ramirez, both 9, sat on a colorful carpet with their classmates at Munroe Elementary School, flipping through “Lienzo Papel,” a children’s book by Alma Flor Ada.
“I think she’s a very good author because she puts detalles” in her stories, said Raquel, who likes stories with lots of details.
The third-graders in Martha Diaz’s class discovered that Ada uses lots of dialogue, writes about people’s rights and tells folk tales.
Diaz said she worked with the students to identify main ideas in stories, find topics and take reading tests.
The work has paid off. The students saw a 21 percentage point jump in reading in the Lectura, a Spanish version of the Colorado Student Assessment Program reading test for third-graders.
In 2006, 42 percent of Munroe third-graders who took the Lectura were proficient or advanced – able to read at grade level or better – compared with 63 percent this year.
Munroe’s English-speaking third-graders saw big gains too. This year, 67 percent were proficient or advanced readers, compared with 27 percent in 2006.
However, just 50 percent of 5,059 third-graders in Denver Public Schools overall were proficient or advanced on the reading CSAP test, compared with 51 percent in 2006 and 52 percent in 2005.
“It’s obviously disappointing, especially in view of how hard we’ve been working this year,” said DPS Superintendent Michael Bennet. “We need to look at places where we saw gains and the places where we didn’t and find out why.”
Computer-assisted reporting editor Jeffrey A. Roberts contributed to this report.
