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Learning the ropes
By LOGAN NEILL © St. Petersburg Times, published March 1, 2001 Editor's note: This story is one in a series appearing periodically during the school year about the trials and triumphs of Brook Bell, a first-year kindergarten teacher at Brooksville Elementary. * * * As 6-year-old Max McLain holds the page in front of him, the three short sentences on it loom large and bold. He draws a breath and begins to read aloud: "Ten eggs fell. Pat felt bad. Pat has a mess!" As he finishes, he lifts his eyes toward his teacher, searching for approval. "That was excellent, Max," she says. "Very, very good." Perhaps nothing defines success to a kindergartener better than knowing how to read. Being able to look at a printed page and recognize vowel and consonant sounds formed into words brings with it a certain pride to children who once could not. It has taken Brooksville Elementary School kindergarten teacher Brook Bell the past 51/2 months to lead her 19 pupils to this point. When school began in August, few knew all the letters of the alphabet, the sounds they make, or how they're put together to make words. "Right now, most of them are right at the door of being able to read," Bell said. "They're getting more comfortable every day. It's great to see." For the 25-year-old Bell, a Hernando High graduate who began her kindergarten teaching career the same day her pupils officially became students of Hernando's public school system, the transformation has been remarkable. Little by little, what once were alien concepts to 5- and 6-year-old minds have become the basics of reading, writing and arithmatic. Each day brings them closer to becoming first-graders in the fall. The uncertainties her pupils faced on the first day of school are long past. What once was a huge, unfamiliar room now is filled with comfort. Ruby Smith, 6, remembers her first day of school well. "I was scared," she said. "The school was so big and I didn't know anyone. I wanted my mom to take me home." The biggest change in her students came after the winter break, Bell says. Since then, she has observed a gradual maturation in her young charges. Although there still are times she has to admonish them, for the most part she no longer has to constantly remind them of their responsibilities. When she calls for them to take out their language or math workbooks, they automatically retrieve them from their cubbyholes at the back of the room and return to their desks ready to work. They have also foregone their daily naps, choosing instead to use their afternoon quiet time for personal projects such as games, looking at picture books or drawing. A new class schedule has allowed Bell to step up the intensity of her lessons. Mornings now are almost entirely devoted to academics, with the students moving from reading and writing to math. In the afternoon, they go to physical education and to "specials": classes such as music, geography and computers. "There was no way they could work like this at the beginning of the year," Bell said. "If we did, too many of them would have fallen behind." Autumn Huntley, 6, says she enjoys the regimen of Bell's classroom. "We do lots of fun things like singing and making things," she said. "But we do lots of hard things, too. I like it all." Another thing that has improved is classroom behavior. Bell says that early on she tended to be more liberal when it came to discipline. "I'm more stricter now," she said. "I don't turn my back on the same things I used to." That, of course, includes bullying, which she found particularly disruptive to her ability to teach. "Discipline is security," Bell said. "They don't like it when people hit them and say mean things. They expect me to keep it from happening." Bell's success so far speaks for itself. According to a recent performance evaluation, only four students were seen as struggling achievers, mostly because of low reading scores. To help bring them up to speed, the students receive outside tutoring from parent volunteers who come in twice a week to help with vocabulary and reading. Bell thinks that with continued tutoring and plenty of parental support, those students will come around. "There were some that I wasn't sure would ever get it, but then a light bulb comes on inside them," Bell said. "A lot of it has to do with trying to reach them, something I'm still learning."
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