Hermansen School Lands $2,000 Literacy Grant

Valley View School District 365U provided this story:

Second-graders at Hermansen Elementary School in Romeoville will soon have a bigger selection of books to take home at night after the Target Foundation awarded a $2,000 literacy grant to the school.

“We’re going to use the money to acquire books for students to use for their reading homework,” said 2nd-grade teacher Krista Makarowski, who applied for the grant last spring. “We want to make sure they always have a book at their reading level.”

Makarowski isn’t sure exactly how many books $2,000 will buy, but she guarantees the second grade team is “trying to find the best deals we can to get as many books as possible.”

As a first-grade teacher at Hermansen, her classes participated in the school’s  “red bag” book program. When she moved to second grade last year, she piloted a similar program in her new classroom.

“All of the books we used were mine,” she recalled. “But because I taught first grade, I had lots and lots of books at the lower level. Now that I’m in second grade, my own supply wasn’t meeting the needs of my higher readers.”

This year, the successful program has been extended to the entire second grade with teachers asking each child to take home a book and read it each night.

“Very few kids have enough books at home, and if they do, they’re generally not at the appropriate reading level,” Makarowski said.

“Reading is incredibly important,” she added. “We find many of our second graders come in with the ability to read the words on a page but they don’t necessarily comprehend it. They need to keep practicing on both their fluency and their comprehension.”