Sister team develops reading program
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The result, said Mary Smithson Craighead and her sister Sandra O. Smithson, is a downward spiral that leads to dropping out of school, crime and prison, or at best, a life of menial labor.
“No reading program in the United States takes into consideration the lack of fundamental knowledge many of these children have,” Craighead said. “Before we attempt to teach them to read, we have to make up the deficit in basic knowledge. It’s almost as if some of these children speak English as a second language.”
Craighead, an 88-year-old former teacher, and Smithson, a 78-year-old Franciscan nun, launched a nonprofit education program in 1993 called Project Reflect and developed a reading program for poor children.
Now the program has been updated with an animated CD-ROM version.
Many poor children don’t know parts of the body, don’t know colors and can’t recognize basic shapes, Craighead said. Some lack the vocabulary to understand basic instructions such as “Put the books on the desk.”
“The language deficit is just terrible,” Craighead said. “We also teach three basic rules: Practice self-control, work before play and always obey the teacher.”
The Reading Success program developed by Craighead and Smithson teaches poor children in four areas: language development, hearing different sounds, discerning different shapes and motor skills.
“I asked my sister if she’d come out of retirement and get his project off the ground,” Smithson said. “In our first year, we raised enough money for about 50 kids. We needed money for 92 — and 90 percent of them were failing.”
The first version consisted of unbound mimeographed sheets. The textbook is now in its second edition. The interactive version includes music and allows children to advance at their own pace.
“We found that many children didn’t like books, but loved computers,” Craighead said.
In the interactive version, Mayor Mary, the helpful computer icon, praises children for the correct response and urges them to try again if the answer is wrong.
Unlike other programs, Reading Success focuses on vowel sounds as the controlling element of each word rather than requiring children to sound out each letter.
It’s a method that appears to be working.
“The program sees children not by age, but by skill level,” said Dr. Stephen M. Camarata, an education specialist at Vanderbilt University. “It takes areas of interest and teaches to the student’s level. It’s not sexy, but it’s very effective.”
Laura Blackwell Clark, principal at Sacred Heart School in Southaven, Miss., said her students enjoy the interactive version of Reading Success.
“We have kids that come from serious poverty and others from upper middle class families,” she said. “There was spontaneous applause when I told the first-grade children that we were getting the new version of the program.”
She said Craighead’s successful career as a teacher has been distilled into the CD-ROM.
“Our kindergarten teacher said that once she introduced the new program to the children, they began to take home books they could read,” Clark said. “She felt it strengthened their confidence — and that’s important for the children.”
Craighead has devoted more than 60 years to teaching. She served as a consultant in the development of the Head Start and on the launch of PBS’s “Sesame Street.”
She’s consulted for 61 public school systems and been principal at four Nashville elementary schools. She has also taught at Fisk, Vanderbilt and the University of North Carolina.
Sister Smithson received Vanderbilt’s Changing Lives Award in 1999. She has published three books, two short stories and many articles on theology, community education, women, poverty, politics and justice.
The two launched Nashville’s first charter school, the Smithson-Craighead Academy, in 2003. Craighead estimates she has trained more than 300 teachers in the Nashville area to use the Reading Success method.
“Our children never experience defeat,” Craighead said. “We’re here to help them.”
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On the Net:
http://www.smithson-berry.org