CRESTLINE — The Crestline Exempted Board of Education had the opportunity to hear some of the school’s first grade students demonstrate what they have learned about phonetics at a meeting Monday evening.
The students took turns reading off a card they prepared, with examples of what they do in class to learn phonetics.
The students would go through their exercises together as an example, and then would give a few more examples to the board members so that they could participate.
Different things they did were tapping their fingers out with each sound in a word, practiced saying words like “word” and adding one letter to change the word, like adding an “L” to make “world.”
The students also would practice changing vowels from hard sounding vowels to soft sounding vowels.
The teachers said the kids look forward to doing this every day and are very motivated, as it helps them visualize words and their spellings to become better readers and writers.
The children are taught how to do this starting in preschool, and it continues up into fourth grade.
Teachers said that if a child can’t read coming out of first grade, that puts them behind, and if they can’t read well going into fourth grade, they only have a 12-percent chance of being successful readers.
In other board business, the school calendar was approved at the meeting, and will feature some delay days for students so teachers may have some time to catch up on things, and there will be no school on election day.
It also was announced Crestline has parent teacher conferences this Thursday from 4-7 p.m. and Friday from 8 a.m. to noon.