Smart-Words
What is Smart-Words?
Smart-Words is a vocabulary building program that engages Native student learning strengths to quickly improve reading levels simultaneously of entire school populations, grades 1-12. Smart-Words is a simple, fast and efficient way to address the extremely deficient reading skills of Native students.
The Smart-Words program increases school attendance, stops mid-year transfers, improves reading abilities, stimulates a "can do" attitude about academics and does so with an entire school.
Further, each student's reading skills rise each day and week. With many Native students reading 2-3-4-5 years below grade level, this program fills that gap and gives all students the success and confidence to overcome these reading deficits. The dramatic increase in literacy and reading levels as a result of this program will have a lasting impact on all students.
How It Works
The Smart-Word program also has special impact on the most troubled and lowest achieving students from financially stressed families. Research shows clear correlations between low income and poor attendance, dropouts, and transfers.
The Smart-Word program is designed so that all children can easily master the process, become 100% achievers, restore self-confidence and quickly improve their self-image. From this improved self-confidence, academics will improve and misbehaviors, suspensions and dropouts will greatly diminish.
The Smart-Words program will dramatically improve reading skills, improve all other academics, and greatly increase attendance. By increasing attendance and decreasing transfers, your school will generate more enrollment and attendance revenue.
The Testing Process
Each school day begins with five (5) Smart-Words announced over the school's public address system. Every student is simultaneously guided through an "Imprint Sheet" that capitalizes on Indian learning strengths to assure higher order thinking and word retention.
Students are then asked to use each Smart-Word in a sentence and learn how other students use these words. Each week, the students are tested for those words covered on the days of their attendance. They are financially rewarded for those words they correctly answer.
The Smart-Words are selected on the basis of being "challenging" and considered necessary to graduate or pass a college or technical entrance exam. Presently, many Native college applicants are unable to pass these exams or meet the reading and writing requirements of these schools.
The Smart-Words program corrects these deficiencies and equips students to easily master post-secondary educational requirements.
The Impact
- Will dramatically improve school attendance (a major problem in almost all Native schools).
- Starts each day with students educationally expectant.
- Teaches, then encourages Native youth to maximally use two of their most powerful learning strengths
- Vocabulary is a tool that is useful for the student's entire life.
- Success breeds success. Smart-Words allows students with low self-image to quickly achieve on the same level as other students, improving self-confidence.
- Increased vocabularies will improve each student's writing abilities.
- Builds a vocabulary-rich student population.
- With parents helping (and learning) the Smart-Words, the entire family can become vocabulary enriched.
- The economic playing field for the financially poor student will be leveled, leading to more content and more educable students.
- The local Native economy will be stimulated.
- Vocabulary acquisition will result in improvements in all other academics.
- Will greatly improve Native students' reading abilities and also a new willingness to read publicly.
- Can increase the involvement of tribal/band council members in their schools' activities (Example: Tribal leaders personally reading the daily Smart-Words).
- Will educate hundreds of students simultaneously in just twenty minutes a day.
- Almost all of the program funds go directly to the students.