ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN HELPED BY YELL SALES

Those who want to see the results of YELL grants need look no further than the smiling children in pictures Linda Robert loves to show off.

The pictures were taken as these proud children showed off their reading skills at the end of a program Robert lead last year at Clippard Elementary School that took the children from being "basically non-readers to being fluent readers," Robert said.

Many of the books for the program were purchased with a grant from the YELL (Youth Education Literacy and Learning) Foundation, which raises money for area literacy programs.

Each year since 1991, funds from the once-a-year sale of YELL paper editions are distributed as grants. This year's sale will be Tuesday. In the eight years of the program, more than $300,000 has been raised for area literacy programs.

The $44,000 in grants last year went to put newspapers in classroom, buy books and to purchase aids for teaching reading and computer programs.

"We are open to many ways to teach reading," said Nancy Jernigan, a member of the board of the YELL Foundation and on the grant selection committee. "But we tend to favor those that put books in people's hands."

That's just what Robert's program did and it was a great success, Robert said.

"Last year, we discovered second graders who couldn't read," Robert said. "Somehow in first grade these students didn't pick up on reading basics."

So Robert, a Reading Recovery teacher leader at Clippard, applied for and received a YELL grant to buy multiple copies of books for this group of 20 second-graders who needed help with reading basics.

The students were taught using principles of Reading Recovery, a national copyrighted program for teaching reading to elementary students who fall behind. The program builds on words the students already know and teaches them to use meaning, visual cues and sentence structure to figure out words they don't know.

The goal is to make them independent readers, Robert said.

By the end of the program, all the children, many of whom started the program reading at a pre-primary level, were reading on at least a second-grade reading level. One had moved from reading on a first-grade level to a seventh-grade level.

Kim Landewee, a third-grade teacher at Jackson South Elementary School, also used YELL grant money to buy multiple copies of books. These were quality chapter books she used to enhance her class' reading program.

"Anything you can do to turn them on to reading and keep their interest helps them learn," Landewee said.

A $1,400 grant last year went to Cape Girardeau Public Library. It was used to purchase books to use as incentives for the teen summer reading program. After reading four books, the children could chose a book to keep as their own, said library director Betty Martin.

"We tried to purchase well-written, quality books of interest to grades six and up," Martin said. These books were often outside the genres the children were used to reading, so Martin hopes they helped broaden participants' reading horizons.

Martin said she enjoyed watching the teens select their books.

"Many of them would pore over the books, reading the back covers, trying to find just the right one," Martin said.

During the summer book club, which was held the months of June and July, 400 books were given out as prizes. That means participants read 1,600 to earn those prizes.

"When you can use books to encourage teens to read books, that's a system that will encourage reading," Martin said.