Language Arts Program Benefits From Your EAC Donation
If your child is enrolled at Eckstein, he or she is taking a Language Arts class and benefiting from Eckstein Annual Campaign donations. EAC funds for the language arts department are directed in large part towards improving each studentís writing skills. As the WASL assessments have demonstrated, writing skills are important in all subjects, including math, where students are increasingly asked to explain their answers in narrative.Your EAC donation funds composition books and other supplies, items for special projects, and books which support the L.A. curriculum. It also pays for theme readers---trained professionals who review and correct papers so that teachers can turn around written assignments more quickly. Typically, theme readers are retired teachers who can provide an unbiased assessment of each studentís writing.
Timely feedback is the most important thing for students, so they can see what they need to improve on, and have grades posted quickly to the Source. For example, if a teacher has 150 students, and it takes an average of 15 minutes per paper to correct and offer positive feedback, it could take a teacher 37.5 hours to grade just one assignment for every student well outside the contracted school day! Theme reading cuts the time it takes to score papers by half. As teacher Tammy Moon notes, "For me, having theme reading money means students can have more thorough writing assignments, because I know I can get the 6-10+ pages per student graded in a timely manner."
EAC funds have also helped make possible Eckstein's participation in an innovative writing program called Writers Workshop, which was developed by the Teachers College at Columbia University. Launched as a pilot program in 2004, it has continued to be used by several of the Language Arts teachers. As one teacher described: "Happy with what we have observed in student work, we were excited to keep (the program) going. Students are generating their own ideas and purposes for writing, and they are tracking progress in their writer's notebooks. We also like the format of the mini-lesson, writing time, and peer conferencing. Students engage in more detailed and writing-focused discussions with each other."
Please help support our Language Arts Department by donating to the Eckstein Annual Campaign today! Send your donation (payable to the Alliance for Education-Eckstein) to Eckstein Annual Campaign, Eckstein Middle School, 3003 N. E. 75th St., Seattle, WA 98115. Thank you!