Welcome to the Prairie School Media Center!
Media Center - 708/364-4869
Mary Ann Curran - Media Center Specialist
Anne Berube - Media Center Associate
About the Media Center
The Library Media Center serves as the information hub of the school. Its purpose is to provide opportunities for students to become critical seekers of information, users of media in all formats, and independent, lifelong learners. The Library Media Program has three components: Literature Appreciation, Library Skills, and Resource Based Learning.
- View the Program Components and Philosophy
"Just Right" Books
- Choose by title
- Choose by author
- Choose by grade level
Online Resources / Internet Safety
Internet Safety Series
Fourth Session: Cyberbullying
Thursday, April 22, 2010
View the Session III Materials
Parent Reading Tips
Library Catalog
The Accelerated Reader Program
- View the AR Reading list
Updated May 2008!
The Accelerated Reader is a curriculum-based assessment tool that provides a summary and analysis of results to enable teachers to monitor both the quantity and quality of reading practice engaged in by their students. Students administer comprehension tests voluntarily themselves, and the system is intended specifically to have strong formative effects on subsequent learning.
A student who uses the program selects a book from the more than 25,000 titles on the AR list. Each book is assigned a point value based on the number of words it contains and its reading difficulty, as derived from a formula based on the Flesch-Kincaid readability index that considers the number of syllables in words and sentence complexity.
After reading, the student goes to the computer and takes a multiple-choice comprehension test on the book's content. Tests may have 5, 10, or 20 items, depending on the length and difficulty of the book. The computer scores the test, awards the student points based on the results, and keeps a complete record. For a book valued at 10 AR points, such as Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, a student would receive 10 points for a score of 100 percent, 9 points for 90 percent, and so on. However, the student must score at least 60 percent on the test to earn any points at all.
As students test on more books, the AR system enables close monitoring of general levels of reading performance. The software provides the teacher with an automatically updated analysis of scores for individuals or whole classes; details include average percentage of correctly answered questions, difficulty of books read, points earned, and other diagnostic information. Computer-generated ""at-risk reports"" enable the teacher to guide each student's reading practice for maximum effectiveness.
- Adapted from http://www.readingonline.org.
|
|
