Melia Brashear

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• Melia Brashear
• Principal

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Eye Catching Literacy Activities

• The Reading Tree
• Santas New Sleigh
• Ready.Set..Action
• Act One The Night Before Christmas
• Act Two Hansel and Gretel
• Act Three The Wild Christmas Reindeer

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The Reading Tree

• Sycamores Christmas theme this year centered
  around The Reading Tree. Once the lighted tree
  was in place, classes began making ornaments that
  were representative of their favorite books. The
  ornaments were then placed on the tree. Teachers
  took the opportunity to conduct crafting lessons,
  that were about Christmas, around the Reading
  Tree!

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Santas New Sleigh

• The story of Kris Kringles new Chrysler
  mini-sleigh, written by one of our Cornerstone
  Literacy coaches, Johnnie Tankersley, contains
  words that begin with chr, kr, and cr. In
  reading and interacting with this story, our
  students were exposed to all six cueing systems.
  We have found that stories like this enable the
  students to use the cueing systems in their own
  thinking, reading, and writing.

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ReadySetAction..Act One The Night Before
Christmas
Johnnie Tankersley, Cornerstone Literacy Coach,
and Perry Phillips, Resource Teacher, brought the
poem, The Night Before Christmas, to life. As
they dramatically recited the poem, students took
an active role in playing out the parts of the
characters involved. In doing this, they were
able to link the Alabama Course of Study for
Language Arts with Cornerstones Conceptual
Framework. Students were actively involved,
improving their comprehension strategies, through
role playing.
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ReadySetAction..Act Two Hansel and Gretel

• Presenting an old fairy tale in drama form, Liba
  Peters, Cornerstone Literacy Coach, created an
  imaginary world with vivid detail. Students
  visualized, or created pictures in their minds,
  and were invited to role play the characters of
  Hansel and Gretel. Drama was used not only to
  entertain, but to explicitly teach the
  comprehension strategies of visualization and
  inferring.

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ReadySetAction..Act Three The Wild Christmas
Reindeer

• After reading the book The Wild Christmas
  Reindeer, Melia Brashear, principal, was excited
  to receive written responses from a second grade
  class. Mrs. Brashear knew this activity had been
  a meaningful experience when she read, I liked
  that story. While you were reading it I felt
  like we were family. This response illustrates
  how we are using literacy as an avenue for
  building family and community within our school.

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Sycamore School

• Sycamore School is extremely proud to be a
  Cornerstone Literacy Site. As we begin to
  include more integrative presentations such as
  drama in our language arts, we hope to see
  comprehension skills soar to higher levels.