Home / News & Publications / Michigan Catholic News / 2009 / St. Mary, Rockwood, on FAST track in teaching reading
St. Mary, Rockwood, on FAST track in teaching reading
by Joe Kohn of The Michigan Catholic
Published January 23, 2009
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Joe Kohn | The Michigan Catholic
A second-grader moves magnetic pieces on his FAST board during a class lesson. |
Rockwood — "There's an enjoyment about reading going on right now."
That's how St. Mary principal Kevin Dufresne describes the results of the new method the elementary school has put in place to teach reading, phonics and spelling.
St. Mary this year started teaching its students using the FAST Reading System, a method more typically found in high-end private schools. St. Sebastian School in Dearborn Heights became the first local Catholic school to employ the program when it put it in place during the 2006-2007 school year.
Both schools financed training and materials for the reading program through grants from Richard and Kathy Genthe, the Catholic owners of a well-known Chevrolet dealership in Southgate.
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Joe Kohn | The Michigan Catholic
St. Mary second-grader Caelan Hunt builds a word on a magnetic board in front of her classmates. The Rockwood-based Catholic elementary school has adopted the FAST Reading System, which uses magnetic boards and specialized books, to help students learn reading, phonics and spelling. |
The FAST Reading System simultaneously teaches phonics and reading by engaging students vocally and visually through the use of magnetic boards and magnets containing letter groupings. It initially was designed to help children with reading disabilities, but has been proven to help students of all abilities, according to those who use the system.
During classes, students sound out various vowel combinations, prefixes and suffixes and, through the use of the magnetic board, are able to rearrange them to create words.
Each teacher has a large board for the class to focus on, and each student has a magnetic board to use in class and for homework. Often, though, students are put into small groups in class to work on grammar together.
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Joe Kohn | The Michigan Catholic
Fourth-grade teacher Laurel Nadeau leads a class exercise using the FAST board. Students follow along in groups, using their own magnetic boards. |
Even when having fun and making up fictional words by using easy-to-remember rules of grammar — which the program sometimes requires — students are learning how various prefixes and suffixes work and what affect they have on a word.
At St. Mary School, the students are happy to talk about the system.
"My favorite part about the FAST reading program is that it allows us to make our own words and learn how to spell new words while we're having fun doing it," says fourth-grader Brendan Scherer, 10.
Brendan's classmate, Leah Ritchie, 9, says it's a good way to get the students to be involved.
"We get to be a part of it and we can move the letters on the board," Leah says. "So it's not just the teacher doing it on the board, but we get to be a part of it, too."
Second-grader Caelan Hunt, 8, says the system helps her out when she's stuck on a word.
"If I stop in a book and there's a word I don't know, I could figure it out from the board because there's lots of things on the board," Caelan says. "So I learn lots of words, and it's really fun."
She and her classmate, Frank Clanerus, also agree that moving around the magnets is less taxing and more fun than writing. "You can stick the pieces on the board," says Frank, 7. "It's a lot easier than writing it down."
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Joe Kohn | The Michigan Catholic
Kevin Dufresne, principal of St. Mary School, says the school uses a new reading curriculum because it makes the most of the students abilities. |
St. Mary started researching the FAST Reading System — FAST being an acronym for Foundations of Analysis, Synthesis and Translation — last academic year. Dufresne, who became school principal at the beginning of the current academic year, says it had to do with finding the "best practices" of teaching.
Having learned of the success St. Sebastian has had with the program, it became apparent what direction St. Mary's administrators wanted to go in. In funding all the teacher training and resources — it cost more than $10,000 to put the FAST system in place — they were blessed to have a generous donation from the Genthes, Dufresne said.
The Genthes, who live in Ann Arbor and are parishioners at St. Mary Student Chapel, once traversed the country looking for a reading system to teach their son, Andrew — now an adult — to read. Andrew had been diagnosed as severely dyslexic.
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Joe Kohn | The Michigan Catholic
St. Mary fourth-graders (from left) Brad Kwalton, MacKenzie Guinn, Jared Lovett and Lindsey Peterson work on a group exercise with the magnetic board during class. |
When they found Stephan Tattum, founder of the program, teaching it at Denver Academy in Colorado, they moved their family there for the sake of Andrew's education. They've been promoting the system, and helping various schools fund it, since. St. Mary first-grade teacher Jessica Richter says the program is successful not just for troubled students but for the average student because it's tailored to put a student at exactly the right level of difficulty.
"The big key to the program is being able to identify where a child is in reading, and then placing them at a level that's challenging," says Richter. She explains that the program also comes with a series of books for each grade. Although the content of the books is specific for the age of the child, the reading levels vary. That way, if a fifth-grader begins the year at a second-grade reading level, he can start out reading something that is age-appropriate as he catches up to the proper reading level.
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Joe Kohn | The Michigan Catholic
Fourth-grade students at St. Mary School work in groups to form words using the FAST system's grammar rules. |
"If you take a fifth-grader, and they can't read, and you have to put them in 'Meet Spot. Spot can, whatever' — a big kid carrying around that book feels like he can't read or that he can't be successful," says Richter.
On the other end of the spectrum, in each grade the books take students to reading levels higher than their current grade. By the end of the fifth grade, a student may well be reading at a sixth-, seventh- or eighth-grade level — instead of being restricted to where his or her classmates are.
"Having 25 kids in the same book in the same series?" Richter says of the traditional way a class moves through reading assignments. "How realistic is that?"
Better results can be seen at St. Sebastian, where the program already has been in place for two years. St. Sebastian principal Sr. Geraldine Kaczynski, FSSJ, says the school has had a number of educators come and observe the system at their school.
Parent Kim Dziewit says her daughter, Alexandra, now in the eighth grade, didn't much care for reading before St. Sebastian started with the FAST program.
"It was amazing, the turnaround, with her," Dziewit says. "We had to force her to read almost, and now she's reading constantly and picking up books almost every single night."
St. Sebastian now has to use "performance groupings" in their school — taking a handful of students from lower grades and having them join higher grades for reading classes, due to their abilities.
The teachers are noticing significant differences, as well. Third-grade teacher Molly Kissel, for example, started the year with a traditional third-grade level spelling book. It wasn't long before she realized it couldn't keep the students engaged. "By the second week, it was just too easy," she said. "They were just so far in advance of the traditional spelling book that we're now using the FAST spelling book."
She also notices that students are discussing amongst themselves — outside of class — the characters from their literature. That's not something they did before FAST was put into place, she says.
Back at St. Mary, Dufresne says the decision to stick with FAST — even though it might not be the most conventional way to teach reading — is one that's been discerned and confirmed.
"It's about what the kids can do," he says. "At the end of the day, all the decisions we make have to be in the best interest of and produce kids who — when they leave our doors in the eighth-grade —academically and spiritually are at the highest levels we can get them to."
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