Principal Jillian Johnson regularly walks the halls of A.L. Burruss Elementary School in Marietta. The practice is part of her routine – a way to check in on her school family, literally.
Johnson is a parent of two Burruss Beavers: Elizabeth, a third grader, and Caroline, a kindergartner.
She stopped by Caroline’s class earlier this winter to watch her daughter learn to read. Mrs. Lauri Bruton led the lesson.
Kindergarten teacher Lauri Bruton walks her class through writing a declarative sentence at A.L. Burruss Elementary School in Marietta, Ga. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)
“[The] beginning of a sentence has to have a…” Bruton asked her class.
“Capital!” the students cheered in unison.
The kindergartners were digging into punctuation, spelling the sentence, “She can snap and skip.”
After sounding out “skip,” Bruton asks the kids how to punctuate the sentence.
“Period!” shouts one student.
“Why?”
“Because [it’s] a telling sentence!”
“It’s a telling sentence! Do you remember that big word we learned? Say it!”
“Declarative!”
Principal Johnson watched quietly from the back of the room with a grin.
Kindergarten teacher Lauri Bruton walks her class through writing a declarative sentence at A.L. Burruss Elementary School in Marietta, Ga. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)
A lot of other kindergartners are still learning the alphabet at this age. But not at Burruss.
A few years ago, Johnson and her staff changed how they teach students to read, transitioning from “balanced literacy” to “structured literacy.” The rest of the Marietta school system has done the same.
“We changed every single practice in how we teach children to read,” the Marietta principal noted. “It is a total 180.”
“Our…
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