West Ottawa Educational Foundation

Prior to completing this application, you must review your ideas with your building Principal.
Please submit grant application to Kent Henson, Administration Building or via e-mail
hensonk@westottawa.net

Name of Applicant(s): Heather Field

School(s) or Group Affiliation: Pine Creek Elementary

Program/Project Title: Growing Fluent through Listening

Amount of Funding Requested: $1,202.64

Date Submitted: October 10, 2014

Proposal

1. Describe the intent/purpose of your proposal. Include a description of the individuals who
will be affected. Please include any additional information/research which might assist
the grant selection committee in making a decision.

The K-3 teachers of Pine Creek Elementary would like to present the idea of incorporating
listening centers into each of the classrooms. As part of our daily reading block, all students
engage in the Daily 5 routines from “the sisters” Gail Boushey and Joan Moser. Each of the
Daily 5 incorporates an activity that pushes students to acheive higher levels of reading. We
would like to focus on “Listening to Reading” for this proposal.

Listen to reading gives students the opportunity to listen to a fluent reader, exposes young
readers to new vocabulary, and gives readers the chance to listen to good literature. In Yellow
Brick Roads: Shared and Guided Paths to Independent Reading 4-12, Janet Allen says:

“It was amazing for us to see students develop such language fluency from reading books
with audiotapes that they were able to wean themselves from the recordings. We watched
them use the tapes for support as they chose increasingly difficult texts, thereby
compensating for the difference between their listening and reading vocabularies” (75).

Young readers strongly benefit from listening to someone else read to them. Richard Allington
states: “Listening to an adult who reads fluently increases students’ own fluency” (Allington).
With classrooms of 25-30 students and increasingly high expectations for literacy, this task
becomes more and more difficult. If each classroom were able to set up a “listening center,” all
students would have the chance to listen to a fluent reader on a daily basis. Boushey and Moser

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also promote listening to reading by saying: “We hear examples of good literature and fluent
reading [during Listen to Reading]. We learn more words, thus expanding our vocabulary and
becoming better readers” (11)

Pine Creek Elementary has been fortunate enough to aquire five ipod shuffles per classroom to
make this center manageable for our young students; however, we do not have comfortable and
reliable headphones. We propose that each of the K-3 classrooms be equipped with seven
headphones from Lakeshore Learning and two headphone splitters from Best Buy. This would
give a total of seven students the opportunity to listen to reading at once.

Resources Cited:

Allen, J. 2001. Yellow Brick Roads: Shared and Guided Paths to Independent Reading 4-12.
Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Allington, Richard L. & Rachael E. Gabriel (2012). Every Child, Every Day. Educational
Leadership. The Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). March 2012
Volume 69 Number 6

Boushey, G., & Moser, J. (2006). The daily 5: Fostering literacy independence in the elementary
grades. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.

2. Has your proposal received support from your Building Principal?

Date of conversation:
Comments by principal:

3. What is your plan for program/project implementation? Include actual procedures,

methods and timing factors.

Once this project is funded, the headphones and headphone splitters will be integrated into each
classroom immediately. As part of each classroom’s daily reading block, five students at a time
are given the opportunity to listen to a fluent reader present a story on the ipod shuffles. With
these new headphones and splitters, now seven students can be incorporated into this station at a
time.

Some procedures might include expectations such as, how to connect the headphones and
splitters into the ipods or how to use these tools safely and appropriately on a daily basis.

4. How and when will you evaluate the effectiveness of your program/project?

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The success and effectiveness of this project can be assessed through fluency assessments such
as DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency or Fountas and Pinnel’s Benchmark Assessments. These
assessments can be used on a bi-weekly basis to show student growth. With more exposure to a
strong fluent reader as a model, students will develop and improve in the area of fluency too.

5. What is your proposed budget? If equipment is being purchased, a specification sheet

must be included. If this is meant to be a continuing program, how will future expenses
be funded?

Proposed Items Number of Items Cost Per Item Total

7 sets per classroom

Headphones from x 3 classes in each grade $99.50 (set of 8)
$1,050.96
Lakeshore Learning x 4 grade levels (K-3) $13.99 (each)
= 84 headphones

Monoprice
2 sets per classroom
Headphone Splitters
x 3 classes in each grade
with Separate $6.32 $151.68
x 4 grade levels (K-3)
Volume Controls
=24 splitters
from Best Buy

Total
Expenses:
$1,202.64

6. If your application is partially funded or not funded at all by the WOEF, what would the
impact be on your program/project?

If this project is partially funded by the WOEF, then Pine Creek will invest in as many
headphones and headphone splitters as the given funds will allow. The items that are purchased
will be distributed equally through the K-3 classrooms.

If this proposal is is not funded at all, then the ipod shuffles, used for Listen to Reading, will be
underutilized and the student population will not have the opportunity to benefit from these
reading tools.

7. Please include any additional information/research which might assist the grant selection
committee in making a decision.

Research and further information is referenced in question #1.

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