On Friday, November 17th, educators throughout the Blackstone Valley gathered at the Three Seasons Restaurant at the Blackstone Valley Regional Vocational Technical High School to honor our Promising Practices Award Recipients for 2024.

Nominated by curriculum directors and endorsed by building principals, Promising Practices in Education recipients are selected because they motivate and inspire students. Their lessons are snapshots of instruction that are engaging, encourage collaboration between students and staff, and demonstrate best practices in meeting student academic and social-emotional needs. Most important, the recipients’ lessons serve as exemplars in cultivating higher order thinking skills across all content areas.

At the Promising Practices celebration, the recipients give an overview of their lessons and try to “plant a seed” of new and innovative teaching practices into the minds of the other educators attending the event.

At the event, Hopedale was pleased to honor Memorial Elementary second grade teacher, Laura Slook. She was nominated for her unit entitled Monthly Reading Challenge. Mrs. Slook has taught second grade at Memorial Elementary school in Hopedale since August of 2020. In 2014, she decided to go back to school to become a teacher after being inspired while volunteering in her sons’ classrooms. She earned her Masters in Elementary Education from Lesley University and has previously taught 4th, 3rd and 1st grade before coming to Memorial.

Mrs. Slook’s unit focuses on establishing reading routines at the beginning of the school year. Students start the year with weekly lessons that focus on how to read independently, how to choose a “just-right” book, how to look for word parts that students know, using schema to make predictions, paying attention to punctuation and reading with expression. In October, students start participating in a monthly reading challenge that runs until the end of the school year and throughout the summer. By the end of 2nd grade, the goal is to have students read for a sustained 20 minutes in school and at home each day. This helps build reading stamina, builds vocabulary and fluency and my reading challenges provide motivation for the students to reach that goal. Families have provided feedback such as, “Thank you for doing the reading challenge, we have noticed a huge difference in —-’s reading! In the fall she was reluctant to read and now this spring she has turned into a little bookworm!”

Congratulations to Mrs. Slook on the incredible honor.