Lamar students come full CIRCLE

Lamar pre-kindergartner Isaac Burgess owns his name.

That ownership is what the 5-year-old stands for and what he builds upon to create his educational foundation.

Isaac, one of 20 students in pre-kindergarten teacher Betty Wagner's class at Lamar Early Education Center, said he enjoys learning the alphabet, identifying lowercase and uppercase letters, writing sentences and working on sounding out sentences with his classmates.

But, most of all, he likes to read.

"I can read every day," Isaac said. "My mom and dad don't have to help me."

Wagner, who's taught at Lamar for 14 years, said students often enter her class knowing their own names and some can even spell their names and recognize letters.

But, each child - no matter their skill level - seems to excel through a program called CIRCLE, which is a state initiative Lamar has used for the past four years to help students learn to listen, read and write through a multitude of activities.

The program, which stands for the Center for Improving the Readiness of Children for Learning and Education, calls for pre-kindergarteners to receive early education skills through activities like listening for syllables and rhymes, doing hands-on exercises and working with letters.

Wagner said the students seem to soak up the skills and learn quickly, which will help them as they enter kindergarten.

Lamar principal Brenda Bentley said the school attributes much of its student success to the program in helping prepare students for their educational careers.

"The kids are that much more ahead of the game when they get to kindergarten," she said.

Many students in pre-kindergarten can communicate through talking, listening and writing while developing language skills, Wagner said.

"That gives them a good foundation to be a good reader and read aloud for me," she said.

Wagner said the class is centered on the students seeing their names in several places in the room from their sign-in sheet to their job duty list.

At the beginning of the year, students correlated their picture to their names and now most students know how to spell their own names.

Wagner said a majority of her class exercises focus on principles outlined by CIRCLE in which students rotate to different stations in the class to work on certain skills like math or creativity.

During a recent class, Wagner worked with five students on listening, letters and sentence segmentation.

Many exercises use pictures or audio to help the students recognize how to put sentences together or which letter is being referred to.

Much of the students' learning involves pictures in relation to words so they can better identify what's being talked about, Wagner said.

"That's our aim to make good listeners out of them and to make good readers out of them," Wagner said.