District 68's Reading Clinic Hopes to Pique Students' Interest

Students follow along with a teacher reading off of a SMART Board. A group performs a play outside. 

There's a tent in one of the classrooms, and the students are eating s'mores.  

Dozens of first through sixth grade students in 's Reading Clinic worked on reading skills for three weeks after school was out, sometimes performing Reader's Theater or playing phonics games outside.  

Inside, the fifth-grade class read passages from a book into a microphone to hear how they sounded.

The annual clinic, held at , allows selected students to get extra attention and encouragement in reading. Students are grouped by grades, with the teacher to student ratio never more than 1:9. Teachers team-teach, so two teachers may work with up to 18 students at a time. 

The students, who are selected by their schools for the program, worked from 8:30 a.m. to noon four days a week for three weeks. 

Each classroom has a different theme, from camping to under the sea and health and wellness. The purpose of the reading clinic is to increase interest in reading.  

"Our philosophy is readers learn to read by reading," said Rosemary Turley, who brought Reading Clinic to the district 14 years ago. 

"After the program ends, there are five, six, seven weeks before school starts. If (the students are) not captivated to pick up a book, they will not enjoy reading during that time." 

Turley said she could see that piqued interest when students can't put a book down as they board the bus to go home. Students' progress is also recorded, shared with parents and kept by the district.

While the program hopes to motivate students to read, the purpose is also to help students pick out the right books. At the end of the program, each student chooses a new book to keep. 

"We follow the five finger rule," Turley said. "If you get to end of a page and hold up five fingers (one for each word you didn't know), you probably don't have the right book for you. If you have no fingers up, you probably need a more challenging book." 

Julie Zasadil is a first grade teacher at . She has worked at the reading clinic for seven years.  

"The reason I do it is it really gives the kids a spark in reading and really helps build their confidence," Zasadil said. 

She said the first-graders' theme, the sea, grabs the attention of her students. "We have high-interest books on sea life and sea animals," Zasadil said. "They want to be here and learn more."