Tori Torrisi’s students love having ants in their classroom. Tori, an elementary school teacher who has been at Westbridge for the last 5 years, is turning the school’s youngest nonreaders into readers with the help of Smarty Ants®!
SmartyAnts®, part of Achieve3000, is a research-driven reading program that differentiates instruction. The fun, interactive online learning environment continuously evaluates each student’s exact skill level, learning temperament, and learning pace. Then, the content system automatically adjusts learning to deliver the right level of skill instruction. No two students will approach the content or process in the same way but they all will reach the same critical milestones for primary-grade literacy success and emerge as confident, capable readers ready for the challenges of second grade and beyond. A teacher’s dashboard makes it easy for teachers to track and monitor student movement through lessons and growth toward fluency and comprehension.
According to Tori, most students who start in her classroom don’t yet know letter recognition or letter sounds. “We are starting at the very beginning,” she said. “Smarty Ants® helps my students by providing them with the basic level of knowledge to build on – it is fun so they love doing it.”
One student who has made exceptional gains is Jasiah.
“He came to me last year struggling with letter identification and letter sounds. Now, Jasiah can read short paragraphs and his confidence level has skyrocketed. Jasiah went from saying ‘I can’t read’ to ‘I can read’ within a year.”
Tori uses other strategies and activities to build on the Smarty Ants® program and help to inspire a love of reading. Students read stories out loud in the classroom, and do other activities to build context. She uses a cut and paste activity with familiar sight words, so students can make the connection with basic words, both on the computer and on paper.
“Watching students like Jasiah grow from non-reader to early reader is one of the joys of teaching,” she said.
