The grant would be used to purchase High Noon Books for use with our special education students in the resource room. High Noon provides books that have fine-art illustrations and are authentic, engaging decodable literature that help students bridge the gap between phonetic decoding and fluent independent reading. “Many of our special education students are significantly below grade level due to their poor fluency and decoding skills. High Noon Books are books for struggling readers that are written with much more than short sentences and low Lexile scores.” explains Jayme Orlando, Principal Clark Mills. These books have controlled vocabulary, subtle repetition of vocabulary, predictable text and illustrations that truly support the story. These are all important factors to consider when selecting the proper reading materials for our students.
The main objective is to give students text at their instructional level to assist with decoding and comprehension lessons taught in the classroom. “It is challenging to find books that our students can read and are of interest to them. Too often, books on their individual reading levels are not engaging to our students.” added Pam Kleschinsky Special Education Teacher. The High Noon book sets provide them with both fiction and non-fiction stories that they can read and are interested in reading. Our objective is to use these books to supplement the classroom instruction and to encourage our students to read, while at the same time, develop confidence in their reading skills.
