I wanted to take a moment and, as a teacher in the classroom, express my explicit support for MindPlay. I’ve been a teacher within IPS for 10 years and within these 10 years I have seen so many programs come and go, with most lasting only one school year. The turnover of programs, while intended each time to find a new or better way, becomes frustrating and disheartening (and I would imagine highly expensive relative to the constant training and re-training of personnel). We (teachers and students) just begin to get into a flow – and the program is gone.
MindPlay is one of the single best FUNCTIONAL programs I feel I have ever utilized. As the teacher within the Daytime Homebound program I can attest that the vast majority of children I have seen be placed here over the years come in as complete non-readers. This is a consistent thread, whether they are in Grade 1 or Grade 6 or somewhere in between. I fully believe that their inability to read plays a major role in the manifestation of the types of behaviors that result in our students being placed in an alternative setting on a very shortened school day. Of course, we know the older they get the worse these behaviors can become simply out of frustration and out of a feeling that school is not a place where they can come to feel better about themselves. School, sadly, becomes the enemy and they begin to feel that failure is their only option.
In my experience with students in Grades 3 and up one of their primary issues in reading is that they are sorely lacking in their foundational reading skills, specifically phonemic awareness, phonics, and sight word knowledge. Teaching these foundations (in Grades 3 and up) is no longer the focus of the curricula so without stopping, going back to the basics, and explicitly teaching/re-teaching these skills they invariably fall further and further behind. The saying that by upper grades you are “no longer learning to read but reading to learn” is very true.
The beauty of MindPlay though is that it is differentiated to EACH and EVERY individual learner based upon their baseline data. It meets them exactly where they are and grows along with them. As indicated above, the majority of my students begin in the K level with the data points indicating a serious deficit in phonics. They are then provided with customized lessons by which to privately work on these areas. I highlight privately because if you are a student in Grades 3-6 it can feel very belittling to be working on the letter sounds that “a” can make when this is what your 1st grade classmates are working on. My classroom is mixed age and grade so this is a real-world issue that I am faced with daily. The other very unfortunate common thread amongst my students is that they come believing – and will actually articulate – that they are “stupid”. Shame on us for them getting to this point to begin with but, I can guarantee anyone, that a 3rd -6th Grader publicly working on basic letter sounds in front of students younger than them does very little to enhance their already lowered self-esteem.
To be clear, privately does not mean without teacher input and engagement. MindPlay is a mastery based program filled with extremely usable data for me as a teacher. After a student uses the program I can pull up a very detailed report to assess errors and miscues in order to further remediate. There are also reports for parents and extremely specific progress reports to better substantiate and detail the “quick view” bar graphs.
On a personal note I have a 3rd grade student, AB, in exactly the scenario that I have described above. He was on OCI for many months with limited success. Obviously to get to OCI things weren’t going well. A key identified “trigger” was reading. He would not work with me in the classroom as we needed to begin with letter sounds and he was embarrassed and frustrated by this. Even mention of a reading block would literally cause him to shut down and walk out. This had been the case for YEARS. However, the ability to use MindPlay changed so much for him! He can work on his own on the computer (already a plus to most students nowadays) and no other classmates need to know what he is working on. It is between just us. As his confidence has grown on MindPlay it has grown with working more directly with me as well. He began practicing his sight words and he then read a decodable reader! Many would diminish this accomplishment as I realize a 3rd grader reading a kindergarten level sight word book is not where we want him to be but then, in my opinion, many are missing the point: Anthony is IN THE ROOM, READING!! He is holding a book in his hand, he is asking to read. His mom actually called me and she videotaped him reading a book I had sent home because up until now she never heard him read a thing. Yes, on the data points he will still show as kindergarten – because he, arguably, begin at a Pre-K level. But bar graphs alone don’t always tell the full stories of our children and the feats they accomplish on a daily basis (which is why I think the prior referenced detailed Progress Reports are so critical).
Clearly I could go on and on! Again, in 10 years I’ve never felt much about our reading programs to be honest. Sadly you become somewhat cynical and feel the program won’t be around very long anyway. This program really re-energized me. MindPlay provides not only functional data (and a TREMENDOUS amount of it) by way of regular progress monitoring but, it also provides actual lessons linked directly to the data to help to improve student scores over time. Rarely have I seen our tools be this integrated and user friendly.
MindPlay is not a substitute for good instruction but rather a wonderful compliment to it! As teachers in classrooms we so badly need not just data but also functional user-friendly resources and tools to improve our data.
Ms. Stone