LMS students on “Fast Forward”

Lauderdale Middle School Students are benefiting from a new program purchased by the county that will set its students on the right path to improving their reading skills.

The program, Fast Forward, has been made available with grant money at Ripley Elementary School for the past two years and had such a good response that the county purchased it for the LMS computer lab.

Teacher Joy Beaird has 125 seventh graders enrolled in the program this nine weeks, and will work with eighth graders for the second half of this semester and sixth graders in the third nine weeks. The program is designed to improve reading skills phonetically with six exercises conducted in eight-minute lessons.

The lessons include Sweeps, which promotes listening accuracy; IDs, Streams and Cards that enhance phonological fluency; Matches that strengthens working memory and Stories that help students understand language structure.

“They have to do them all every day and work up to 100 percent,” said Beaird, who monitors the class through a program on her computer that lets her know when her students are having trouble. “(When they achieve 100 percent,) they use the time to keep working on their other skills until they complete them all.”

The system produces a report at the end of each class to let Beaird know how her students are progressing. Rewards are given at the end of each day, week, nine weeks and year for the students who show the most progress.

Students blow their top over science project

Going …

Going …

Gone!

Students in Ms. Karen Norfolk’s eighth-grade science class at Lauderdale Middle School recently got to the bottom of a controversial subject when they mixed Mentos and Diet Coke for a class science project.

The experiment has been visited this summer by several television shows, including Numbers, David Letterman, The Today Show, and Mythbusters, as well as being featured in the Commerical Appeal and on the Internet.

Throughout the week, students learned the scientific method as well as chemical and physical reactions to ingredients incorporating math skills and media research.

“It was a good attention grabber for the first week of school,” said Norfolk, who let the children do individual experiments with additional types of candy and drinks of their choice. “It generated a lot of interest. Hopefully, that’s going to be the trend for the year. To keep the interest up is my challenge.”

Lauderdale site for “Learnia”

Lauderdale County is one of two school systems in the state to be awarded a pilot program for “Learnia,” a state-specific testing program that gives immediate results to teachers on the progress of individual students in their classrooms. The new pilot is currently being implemented at Lauderdale Middle and Ripley Elementary schools.

“We were very pleased to be selected and then to be invited to be a pilot program,” said Superintendent Phillip Jackson. “And the reason (we were chosen) is that our value-added scores have been so good.”

The program has been added to 14 school systems throughout 27 southeastern states. The other pilot site in Tennessee is in the Oak Ridge School System.

“Oak Ridge is a high income system that puts a lot of money into its schools,” said Jackson. “We are a low income system that doesn’t put as much money in. We are at opposite ends of the economic spectrum.”

Choosing school systems that differ in economic structure will allow Harcourt to see how its program can be used in school systems throughout the nation.

“The Harcourt program is preparing students to take the bigger tests,” said Jackson. “It gives teachers immediate results on the computer and also divides the information into the subgroups addressed by AYP.”

Receiving the information so quickly will allow teachers to find the students who are not absorbing the information and make adjustments as needed in the classroom. Dividing the information into the subgroups used by state and federal mandates will also allow teachers to be sure that their students are on course with their grade level’s annual yearly progress.

“One reason that Lauderdale County was chosen is that Mr. Jackson has the vision to move the county forward,” said Lauderdale County Schools Elementary Supervisor Harriet Shelby. “The key in this system has been the leadership, the same as the key in the schools has been its leadership.”

“We do a lot of progressive things,” said Jackson. “We do more with less than a lot of counties."

Lauderdale Middle School
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2006-07
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2006-07

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