Speaker: Nico Silva, Rising 2nd Grade Teacher
Nico Silva: Hi, I'm Nico Silva. I am in my third year of teaching and I teach at Brilla Public Charter Schools at the Veritas Campus in the Melrose neighborhood of the South Bronx. This year I got to teach a wonderful, brilliant group of bright, rising second graders with Lavinia's Rise Summer Program.
What did you find most helpful about the RISE Summer Program?
Nico Silva: What I liked most about the Rise Summer Program from a teaching perspective is that the content was all there. It was ready to go. All I had to do was internalize it and launch. I also loved the way they had development meetings where you could bring all your questions as an educator about this content, to the content creators themselves.
What kind of results did you see in the classroom?
Nico Silva: I had a lot of students that were really struggling with understanding a math story. They were very procedural driven, they were listening for keywords and they were just kind of plugging in numbers regardless of what the actual story said.
Math for Meaning™ Story Problems
Nico Silva: The Math Stories curriculum with the Rise Summer Program gave them so many 'at bats' with that particular skill. It allowed me to ask them a lot of probing questions to gauge their comprehension and I saw their ability to understand and to also discuss with proper math vocabulary, their higher order math thinking. I saw that all grow.
Systematic Phonics Routines
Nico Silva: It was also beautiful to see my scholars that struggled with basic phonics skills grow better at their blending. and their uh, sight reading. So the phonics program with Lavinia, it was just magical.
Nico Silva: So many opportunities to practice glued sounds, uh, common digraphs, uh onset consonant blends. It was just making their reading just so snappy and quick instead of choppy, very unsure and unconfident, um, reading that I was seeing at the beginning of the program.
Would you recommend this program to other schools?
Nico Silva: I would recommend the Rise Summer Program to other schools because I saw so much growth in my own class and I saw it really fill in the gaps that needed to be filled at the end of last year due to the pandemic and the massive loss of learning we had. It was a very tight, lean, focused curriculum that really zeroed in on those essential skills that prepared my class, which in this case was transitioning from first grade, second grade. It really prepared them for the grade to come.
Nico Silva: It changed my whole perspective on what summer school could be.
Nico Silva: what summer school could be, from this haphazard, just, you know, trying to get through some 'Byzantine' mishmash of standards. And it just made it really nice and
Nico Silva: It just made it a really nice and focused intervention for those kids who really needed it.
