Thanks to Joni Jay's grant from the Lexington Education Foundation, Estabrook students have become more fluent in writing and, she believes, has helped increase their scores on the fourth grade English Language Arts MCAS.

"This is my fifth year at Estabrook. We started examining our students' writing [just after I started]. We determined that it is a weaker area for our schools and wrote it into our school improvement plan," she said Tuesday.

In the process, Jay found two other principals shared her goal and the three decided to form a "group initiative" dealing with non-fiction writing to help them move forward with positive results.

They started with a small group from each school and looked at possible solutions. Eventually they came up with the John Collins Writing Approach, which focuses on writing "across the curriculum," Jay said. After writing a grant proposal, the Lexington Education Foundation awarded Jay and the schools a grant of $9,445 in May 2001 and $5,989 in May 2002, all of which has been used on training courses and materials for teachers.

"This is a useful, everyday type of writing for a child to have," she said. More importantly, "this approach can be laid on top of whatever method the teacher uses. It is a management strategy."

Jay said this method, begun by John Collins, has been around for years. According to The Network Inc.'s Web site, the sole distributor of Collins' materials, the goal of the program is to get children writing in every subject.

"Central to our work is the belief that writing enhances the learning process of any subject at any level. To help teachers encourage students, we have developed a model for a writing-to-learn/writing across the curriculum program that has at its core four elements: Cumulative Writing Folder; Oral Reading; Focus Correcting; and Practicing Editing Skills on Past Papers," read the site.

Jay said her goal was similar to theirs in that she wanted the students to become "fluent" in writing, which was an end result of using the Collins program.

"We needed something flexible enough to be used by many teachers, but also something with a commonality," Jay said.

Part of the program included daily "quick writes" where a teacher would give the children around three minutes to write something on a given topic.

"Maybe I would ask them to list three things they remembered from yesterday's class. The goal is to have them become fluent writers, to get used to putting something down on paper. It doesn't have to be accurate, just fluent," she said.

One of the most important parts of this is for teachers and parents to understand children "can't correct everything at once," she said. Instead, part of the Collins program tells teachers to have "focus correction areas," where each child is responsible to getting three aspects right. For example, Jay said a third-grade student may be asked in research on an animal to list five facts about the animal, get all capitals and spelling correct and use five active verbs. Those would be the only things corrected on the assignment so the child could master them before moving on.

"This allows a child to know how success is going to be measured," said Jay.

That's not to say that a child is excused from knowing areas they are not focusing on. Each grade level has focus areas and mastered areas and, according to Jay, "There does come a time at which things need to be mastered."

Jay said so far, so good. She has three sources to judge the children's progress: teacher reports, all-school writes, and MCAS.

From the teacher reports, she has learned "the children are much more fluent, even in kindergarten, they don't have the feeling of 'I don't know how to start,'" she said. "This is a great improvement for our children."

The all-school writes are done twice a year and "that is also showing improvement over time," she said, noting there are clear changes seen. Jay said most children now know what a beginning, middle and end are of a composition. The students are also using a broader vocabulary.

As far as the MCAS go, in the fourth-grade English Language Arts, there is a section for topic development, organization and development of details. Out of a possible 12 points, last year Estabrook students averaged 8.7; this year, 10.1, "which is amazing," said Jay, adding "sixty-nine kids scored ten, eleven or twelve points in topic development this year."

Overall Jay is very pleased.

"For the past four years I have seen a steady increase every single year. The trend that I see is that kids are able to organize something they're writing. The are able to use a [broad] vocabulary and add details. We're feeling pretty good about what's happening," she said.

Jay's next step is to go district-wide. The four schools who have benefited from the first two grants are: Harrington, Estabrook, Fiske and Bridge. The remaining two, Bowman and Hastings, received a grant to get aboard this year.

"After seeing our results, the other schools applied [for a grant] too. Everyone else is getting trained this year," she said.

Peggy Shukur from the LEF, said she is hearing positive results from the schools.

"The principals are feeling that the writing approach and ... [the] training ... made a difference. Just this morning I was at Estabrook and saw the upwards trajectory in the MCAS scores since the program was instituted," Shukur said.