Jacki Angus, Hillarie Jones, Sarah Verbeek, Lisa Frost, Tami Mothershed and Jeni Protain

The team’s innovative teaching idea, “ELA Materials,” will help kindergarten and first-grade teachers align more closely to the Science of Reading through the purchase of research-based ELA (English Language Arts) materials. The Science of Reading is the decades-old research that uses science, especially M.R.I.s, to show how children best learn to read and what the best practices are for teaching reading. Most classrooms lack many high-quality materials such as sound walls and decodable texts for our students. The teachers believe using these materials will improve students’ decoding, writing, spelling, and reading comprehension skills to set them up for reading success.