Spotlight On...Reading
October 2nd, 2024
Dear Park Community,
This year, I’m committed to writing a series of letters that focus on the distinctive value of a Park education. This first one will focus on reading at Park. Teaching reading is the core component of our school’s curriculum. The capacity to read fluently and deeply will stay with you for the rest of your lives, as our proud alumni can attest. Reading is a foundational skill that shapes our understanding of the world and propels our personal and intellectual growth. It is not just a means of gathering information; it is a pathway to empathy, critical thinking, and creativity. In an era dominated by social media and instant information, the importance of deep reading, that is, reading to sustain engagement with a written text, remains more crucial than ever.
This summer, our lower school faculty took part in The Science of Reading, a vast and interdisciplinary body of scientifically-based research about reading and issues related to reading and writing. Reading skills at Park begin to be taught in Kindergarten through sound recognition, phonics, and decoding skills. There are a number of different ways our students practice these skills through small group work and independent reading, and daily word study at home. Though reading for comprehension begins at the earliest ages at Park, we begin to focus on understanding the meaning and nuance of text in the middle of second grade. The emphasis on textual interpretation deepens in third and fourth grade and then is sustained throughout the middle and upper school curricula. By the time a student graduates from Park, they are reading and interpreting and critiquing at the collegiate level.
At its core, reading is essential for acquiring knowledge. Park students do have some choice in the books they are reading at school, and those books are thoughtfully chosen by our lower school faculty. There are specific criteria teachers use when choosing books for their lessons, including but not limited to a book that has a strong theme that can help the students learn about cultures other than their own.
In middle school and upper school, our English department meets regularly to determine which books are used for class assignments and electives. Our faculty strongly believes in wanting our students to be represented in the stories they are reading. By experiencing the thoughts and feelings of characters from diverse backgrounds, readers develop a greater sense of empathy and emotional intelligence. This connection to others' experiences fosters understanding and compassion, qualities that are essential to Park’s mission to develop graduates who lead lives of service.
In addition to fostering empathy and critical thinking, reading stimulates creativity. Literature, in particular, invites readers to envision new worlds, explore intricate plots, and reflect on profound themes. In Grades 5 and 6, students get a “book taste” of the different books that are assigned for book club, and they can choose which book they will read for the unit. Within these book club groups, everyone has a role: there is a literary luminary, a discussion director, a summarizer, and a conflict connector. Students work together to decide how much they will read each week and how they will divide up their work, with the teacher serving as the facilitator of the groups. This idea of choice extends to our upper school, where semester-long electives are designed and taught by our teachers in a thoughtful way. These elective offerings are constantly changing, and never offered back to back. If this idea is new to you, think of it like this: instead of our students taking a general 10th grade English class, they have the opportunity to take two semester long thematically-based courses that satisfy the same requirement to graduate, and they can choose which one they would like to take, the same way a college student does.
Park’s library is open to our students every day, as we are one of the few private schools in Western New York that employs a dedicated, full-time librarian. Our library is a busy place - all students at Park, from Prek and Montessori to Grade 12, use our library. Lower school students have their library special, which may have Mr. Lew reading to them or he may introduce them to databases and how books in a library are organized. Our middle school students participate in a reading club in the library and take their seminar class, which culminates in presenting their research project to classmates and parents. Students in Grades 9-12 use our library at Park as a reference library the way they will use their college library.
At Park, reading is essential to the School’s ability to enact its mission. Reading enhances our knowledge, cultivates empathy, fosters critical thinking, sparks creativity, and promotes mental well-being. In an increasingly complex world, the ability to decode, comprehend, and interpret is not merely an academic skill but a vital tool for personal development, professional advancement and societal engagement. We prioritize reading, because we know as our students grow as readers, they will contribute to a more informed, compassionate, and innovative society.
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