Marti Severson

     I enjoyed reading all the interesting entries so far. My name is Marti and I live in Wheeler (it is 4 miles south of Manzanita) on the beautiful Nehalem Bay. I teach 3rd grade in Tillamook and I look forward to having 24 students in the fall. In Tillamook, we have a K-1 school, a 2-3 and a 4-6. My school has about 280 kids with about 30% speaking Spanish. We do have 1 child that speaks Chinese and one child from Thailand. I don't know how teachers manage with all the different languages...I am struggling to reach my children that speak Spanish, or I should say I find it difficult to communicate with their families.
     I have been teaching for 18 years, and I have always taught 3rd, 4th or a 3-4 blend. I shared a job with my friend for 6 years, which gave me time to work one-on-one with a special young woman who had Down's Syndrome. She was medically fragile, so I had to go to her home to teach her. (She was really my teacher) She taught me so much about people with disabilities. I enjoyed my time with Jenny, so I thought I should go back to school and get my Master's in Special Education. I graduated from Portland State in 1999, and returned to teach 3rd grade at South Prairie in Tillamook which is a quaint school in the country. Even though I am not working directly in special education, I use what I learned at P.S.U. everyday. Many of the strategies that work for kids with special needs really work for everyone. I have been here for 11 years and have had wonderful principals who always gave us limitless autonomy. Last year, our new principal came from a low-performing school (in our district) which raised their reading scores with the help of Reading First. They actually raised their reading scores to over 90% meeting the state benchmark. Last year was the first year we combined schools in this new configuration. One of the reasons the schools were configured in this new way  was because almost all of the Hispanic kids went to Liberty. There were problems when the kids reached 4th grade, and part of the reason Liberty's scores were so low were in part due to having almost 50% of their kids being English-Language Learners. So last year was the first year with this restructuring. I have to say it is wonderful. My ELL kids were the nicest, kindest and most respectful kids in my class. My new principal patterned our school very much like her Reading First School. We had about 96% of the kids meet the benchmark in reading. They will raise the standard next year by 7 points, which is good because the kids could take the test 3 times. We spent about 120 minutes a day on reading, which left little time for science, social studies and art. We use Houghton-Mifflin for our reading series, with a lot of pull-out for Title I and ELL programs. We will be incorporating The Daily Five in our language arts block next year which I think will be positive. My district provides professional development for the ELL endorsement which is very helpful.
     In my free time I love to knit, hike, read and garden. I love old movies as well. It is so nice to have a little bit of time to do something other than work.
     I wanted to add that our district in one of three in the state that is working with the Chalkboard Project. They are working on ways to improve education and I was a bit skeptical about this. One good thing they do is provide us with mini-grants...they pay us to do curriculum work that we would normally do on our own time. They can be for whatever you like. My team likes to make flipcharts for our Activeboard, but we've also done them for our science fair or making Big Books for Glad units. They have spent a lot of time trying to improve teacher evaluation. Some of it is very positive.
Marti Severson
Week 1-Introduction