CLC Academy Parent Dinner
January 12, 2017
Parenting
Community Learning Center Blog
Honor Roll for the 1st time in her life!
October 18, 2016
Success Stories
“My daughter S. has been coming to Clearwater (Community) Learning Center for two years now. She started in the 2nd grade. She was struggling to keep up in school. She hated school and didn’t want to go. As you can see, school has changed a lot since we have gone to school.
“The teachers tell you on Back to School night if your child falls behind, it is up to us as her parents to get her caught up. This can be very difficult considering they don’t send home her workbooks but pull pages out of them and send them home because they want the child to be doing the work, not the parent. We don’t know how they are doing the new math so when we show them how we were taught, it confuses them more. I learned pretty quickly that if I wanted my daughter to learn the basics like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division that I would have to teach her.
“I still can’t believe they stopped giving spelling words after 1st grade. Then tell me we are going to the computer age and there is spell correct. Wow. You can imagine I’m just shocked about that.
“They (teachers) want them (students) to be able to pass these tests so they can have raises. My daughter is struggling to pass these tests.
“S’s tutor Theresa has filled an educational void and become her teacher. It has been a long road trying to play catch up while they keep pushing S. forward even though she is not ready for it. Finally, we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. She is learning her basics with Theresa and that is helping her in school. She is having fun doing it.
“S. is actually getting B’s and is on Honor Roll for the first time in her life. We couldn’t be more thrilled. We would like to say thank you for being there for not only our child but also all children who need help with learning.” -C.D. (mother)
Free Books for Kids event -Saturday, Sept. 10th!
September 6, 2016
Books For Kids Events
The next Free Books and Art for Kids event is happening THIS Saturday, Sept. 10th from 11am – 1pm. All kids can take home as many FREE books as they would like.
We will also have:
Art
Games
Snacks
Info for parents on helping your children
Musical performance by Artists for Human Rights
Ice cream social: $1 cones, $3 create-your-own sundaes
Fun, fun, fun!!!
at Community Learning Center
1411 N Fort Harrison Ave.
Clearwater, FL 33755
(727) 441-4444
This event is open to the public. Bring your friends!!!
The Teacher Who Couldn’t Read
July 6, 2016
Educational
John Corcoran thought that he would never learn how to read; that something was wrong with him. He was 48 years old before he discovered that something is wrong with the system – the school system.
John Corcoran spoke at the Florida Literacy Coalition conference on May 4th. This coalition is made up of volunteers and professionals who teach adults how to read. One in six adults cannot read above a 4th grade level; a high percentage of those cannot read above a 2nd grade level.
At age 48 he sought help from a volunteer reading coach at a library. She got him tested and it turned out that he just did not know how the written language worked. “A teacher broke the code for me,” he said. And in 13 months he went from a 2nd grade reading level to a 6th grade level. He was then functionally literate. However, it took seven years for him to feel like he could really read anything he wanted to read.
John Corcoran says that his illiteracy “suspended me in childhood”. He had a bad feeling about teachers and about himself. By second grade he had been placed in the “dumb room”. The teachers of course didn’t refer to it as the dumb room, but the students did. He rebelled, got in fights, and was a troublemaker all through elementary school.
In high school, John was an athlete, was popular and dated the valedictorian who did his homework. He stopped being a “cut-up” and became a “kiss-up”. He graduated from high school with a 2nd grade reading level and an athletic scholarship.
Teen Athlete Success!
April 5, 2016
Parenting, Success Stories, Tutoring Services
Community Learning Center and We Believe in Me saving lives together!
Community Learning Center has partnered with the We Believe in Me Foundation to help teen athletes improve their skills, their grades and therefore, their chances of being accepted by universities. As a result, they also improve their ability to continue playing football through college. Community Learning Center helps these students improve their ACT and SAT scores so that they are better candidates; we teach them the study skills needed to be able succeed in every area of life. We Believe in Me helps your athlete through the college process, including how to improve your college application and work with recruiters.
Here is another example of a math success from a Community Learning Center and We Believe in Me teen athlete:
“I feel like you [my volunteer tutor] really helped me understand Algebra and its symbols. You broke each of them down to me by showing me, and having me find the meaning of the symbols. Then you explained how to set each problem up and remember how they are supposed to be set up. This became a real eye opener for me in Algebra.”—D.M. (Community Learning Center and We Believe in Me student)
Another We Believe in Me Student Success!
March 24, 2016
Success Stories
Community Learning Center and We Believe in Me are changing lives!
“Today, I learned and revisited grammar and how to properly make complete sentences. I learned when to use verbs, colons, apostrophes and past/present tense. I also learned how to pick the best choice for a passage, making it as short as possible.”
“I took my PSAT (Preliminary SAT test) at school. I went in very confident. I feel the only reason I succeeded today on my PSAT is because of the Clearwater (Community) Learning Center. If it weren’t for the CLC I most likely would have winged my test. When I first came to the Center, they gave me two tutors. These two women gave me the knowledge I needed to be prepared. Thank you CLC for my two tutors. They taught me what I needed to prevail, such as past participle, parts of speech, clearing words and reading comprehension. I have now improved almost almost 3 full grade levels in comprehension!”–T.K. (CLC and We Believe in Me student)
We Believe in Me Student Success!
March 14, 2016
Parenting, Success Stories
“After attending tutoring for awhile, I went back to school and was working on classwork. I started to notice more and more every day some of the things I am learning being tied into my teacher’s teaching. This tutoring has helped (me) gain back some advanced and some simple learning skills that are key in my learning.
I remember being taught back in 4th and 5th grade about my verbs, pronouns, and adjectives, but until tutoring, I couldn’t recall any of the information I was taught about them. I feel this program is amazing. I feel as if it has brought some of the great things I knew back from the dead.”–A.J. (Teen Student)
The Community Learning Center has been working with We Believe in Me Foundation student athletes to help improve their skills and grades in school so that they may continue to play football at university. We help these students with basic skills by filling in the gaps of their education programs and helping prepare them to take the ACT and SAT tests. Our students are better prepared for college because they learn how to study and how to overcome the barriers to study. We are creating independent learners who will become productive members of society. If you are interested in signing your teen athlete up for tutoring, please contact the Community Learning Center at (727) 441-4444. Scholarships are available to families who qualify.
Student Success!
February 29, 2016
Success Stories
CLC helped unlock my mind!
“Cayden came to the Community Learning Center early in 2015 while in third grade. He was struggling with reading comprehension and math and was failing in school. Sharon began to work with Cayden and he started understanding better. Her easy-going yet determined personality made it easy for him to like and trust her.
Cayden is now an Honor Roll student. He verbalized that ‘Ms. Sharon helped unlock my mind.'”–N.F. (grandparent)
*The family recently returned with Cayden’s sister who is now in 3rd grade. They want Sharon to “unlock” her mind, too.
Community Learning Center and We Believe in Me
February 22, 2016
Donate, Educational, Tutoring Services, Volunteer
Back in the spring of 2015, Community Learning Center (CLC) began working with the We Believe in Me Foundation (WBIM) to help talented young athletes who did not have the academic scores necessary for admission to college. Brenda McCarthy and Jerry Wunsch, co-founders of We Believe in Me, have been working with CLC staff to get students qualified. Jerry was an offensive lineman for 9 seasons in the NFL with the Tampa Bay Bucs and the Seattle Seahawks.
Our Community Learning Center and We Believe in Me athletes have been working hard to improve their skills, and therefore their grades. Here is a success from of one of our student athletes:
“The Community Learning Center has helped me tremendously. Before I joined this family, I was struggling but I fought my way through and started studying and focusing on my grades and the ACT test all summer. I did virtual classes while others were having fun and enjoying their summer.
I got B’s in a full year of English. Without any of these people that entered my life, I would not be going to the University of Akron.
These people are great and they love their jobs. They worked to help me prepare for the ACT and earn a score of 24, which is excellent!
Thanks to everyone who believed in me and never gave up on me!”–D.G. (Teen Athlete Student)
What’s Wrong with this Picture?
February 3, 2015
Educational, Parenting
Written by: Holly Haggerty, Executive Director
In my last post I discussed the phenomenon of pile on—asking kids to do work that is above their instructional and developmental level.
This phenomenon occurs right away in kindergarten where kids are expected to learn how to write lists, narratives, information, and opinion pieces before learning to print the letters. Pinellas County Schools recommends that teachers provide handwriting instruction only twice a week for five minutes.
The fact is, it is expected that at the end of the year kindergarteners will produce narratives in barely legible scrawl.
It has been that way for many years. We see the results of this practice at our Center—middle and high school students whose handwriting is barely legible. Many of these same students hate writing—perhaps because writing was difficult for them right from the start, having been asked to write full texts prior to mastering the letters.
In the Next Generation Sunshine State Standards, the previous set of Florida standards, kindergarteners were expected to learn the following writing process:
1. Pre-writing
2. Drafting
3. Revising
4. Editing
5. Producing a finished piece of writing 1
The same standards said that by the end of kindergarten students will “print many of the upper and lower case letters and recognize the difference between the two.”
In the new set of standards, LAFS (Language Arts Florida Standards), the following benchmark is given for the end of kindergarten: “Use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to compose opinion pieces in which they tell a reader the topic or the name of the book they are writing about and state an opinion or preference about the topic or book (e.g., My favorite book is…).”
Again the standards say that the student will “Print many upper- and lowercase letters.” 2
Recent Comments