Media releases

• Grade 4 students vying for sweet taste of business success

  Friday, May 31, 2024 | By Brock University

  MEDIA RELEASE: May 31 2024 – R0070

  When life gives you lemons, make lemonade — and a profit.

  That’s what 75 energetic Grade 4 students hope to do when they transform Brock University’s Jubilee Court into a hub for their carefully crafted lemonade stands next week.

  As part of the Goodman Lemonade program, students from Pine Grove, Stevensville and Garrison Road Public Schools will be on the lookout for thirsty customers to sell their product to on Thursday, June 6 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Organized by Brock University’s Goodman School of Business, the program squeezes business skills into Grade 4 classrooms in Niagara.

  Goodman Lemonade has been teaching Niagara elementary students the basics of building a for-profit business since 2017.

  “We want students to start thinking about entrepreneurship as a career possibility early, and this program is designed to help make sure that their first business venture is a positive experience,” said Lauren Smith, Goodman’s Student Leadership Co-ordinator.

  The program includes classroom visits leading up to the sale date and is designed to tie into the Grade 4 curriculum and reinforce the concepts students learned in class this year.

  “The Goodman Lemonade program has provided a real-world context for students to apply financial literacy and mathematical modelling skills,” says Stevensville Public School teacher Sarah Feduck. “Students deepened their learning about unit rate, proportions and computations. The kids are so excited to put their learning to the test to see how they can effectively plan, market and sell their product.”

  FirstOntario Credit Union has partnered with Brock to help students of all ages build financial literacy skills through the development of innovative, student-centred programming. This support has helped develop the Goodman Lemonade program among other initiatives.

  “This partnership supports our focus on connecting with students and helping to build important financial literacy skills in a fun, practical way, something that we believe is extremely important for young people,” said Joanne Battaglia, Senior Vice-President, Marketing, Communications and Community Partnerships, FirstOntario Credit Union. “This is a great way to connect with youth and community leaders such as Brock and the Goodman Lemonade program and to see students get excited about entrepreneurship.”

  Attendees are asked to bring change and small bills for their lemonade purchases.

  Goodman Lemonade details:

  • Who: 75 Grade 4 students from Pine Grove, Stevensville and Garrison Road Public Schools.
  • What: Teams of students competing for the top lemonade sales.
  • When: Thursday, June 6 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
  • Where: Jubilee Court at Brock University (free parking is available in Lot 1, 2 or 3)

  For more information or for assistance arranging interviews:

  * Maryanne St. Denis, Manager, Content and Communications, Brock University, mstdenis@brocku.ca or 905-246-0256

  * Stacey Marshall, Director, Communications and Public Relations, FirstOntario Credit Union, Stacey.Marshall@FirstOntario.com

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  Categories: Media releases

• Project empowers schools to improve children’s reading through science, collaboration

  Wednesday, May 29, 2024 | By Brock University

  MEDIA RELEASE: May 29 2024 – R0069

  A unique collaboration between Brock researchers, The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) has laid the groundwork to improve the abilities of young children with reading difficulties.

  The project shows the benefit of science-based reading interventions delivered through an effective partnership, indicating that children with reading difficulties who received the intervention Empower Reading: Decoding and Spelling (Grades 2-5) at their schools in Grade 2 or Grade 3 were able to catch up to grade-level reading proficiency by Grade 5. Earlier intervention yielded better results, but students in both years fell within the Grade 5 benchmark range.

  Empower Reading includes 110 progressive lessons taught daily on strategies to help children decode new words.

  The intervention has been developed over 35 years of research by Senior Scientist and Professor Emerita Maureen Lovett of SickKids and the University of Toronto and a team that includes Professor Jan Frijters of Brock’s Department of Child and Youth Studies as well as Karen Steinbach, Maria De Palma and Léa Lacerenza at SickKids.

  Results of the project are detailed in a paper, “Empowering Schools to Implement Effective Research-Based Reading Remediation Delivers Long-Lasting Improvements to Children’s Reading Trajectories,” which appears in the Journal of Learning Disabilities. The study’s lead author, Brock Assistant Professor of Child and Youth Studies Erin Panda, completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the SickKids research team. She says the paper and partnership featured therein show how researchers and educators can take science from controlled lab environments and work it into people’s daily lives.

  “This study, along with Maureen Lovett’s previous work, shows that almost all children who struggle with reading can overcome challenges and can learn to read if they receive evidence-based instruction,” says Panda. “We can change the course of somebody’s whole life, especially if these practices are in place early — but if we wait, there’s a bigger gap to overcome and it makes it much more challenging.”

  Frijters says the results outlined in the paper are noteworthy in that students in the field showed comparable gains to clinical research participants. He attributes this to both the ground-up work by teachers, trainers and mentors and the top-down commitment of resources, monitoring and communication from school board administrators.

  “Implementing a research-based solution needs a system solution,” he says. “With co-ordinated efforts by researchers, teachers, administrators and policy-makers, it is possible to scale proven reading interventions and provide all struggling students with the high-quality support they need to become proficient readers.”

  Program Managers De Palma and Steinbach lead the team at SickKids responsible for training and mentoring teachers who will implement Empower Reading, which has reached some 5,500 teachers across more than 50 school boards since 2006 to serve more than 85,000 students across Canada and parts of the U.S.

  “What we’ve learned from all of our work is the potential for kids to make really wonderful gains in their reading skills, and that even though not every student is going to make the same gains, all will make progress,” Steinbach says.

  Sonia Zolis was a learning resource teacher with HWDSB in 2006 and part of the board’s first Empower implementation. In 2010, she became a special assignment teacher and trainer-mentor to continue to support the board’s use of Empower, a role she retired from in 2023. Today, she continues to work as part of the trainer-mentor team for SickKids, because the collaborative partnership fostered between trainers, mentors and teachers is crucial to the program’s success.

  “At the end of the year, especially for teachers in their first year working with Empower, it’s like Christmas in June,” says Zolis. “The pre- and post-intervention data collected shows each child’s response to the program and the teachers can see how students have made gains on their individual learning-to-read journeys.”

  The paper’s authors all stress the need for strong partnerships with teachers, principals and school boards to get the science of reading to the people who need it most.

  “Over 35 years, we were very fortunate to find school boards that were wonderful partners, hungry for research findings and flexible enough to try new methods of instruction and new materials,” says Lovett. “This partnership is an example of how researchers and professionals from other institutions can work together with school boards to effect meaningful change based on the findings from research they do together.”

  For more information or for assistance arranging interviews:

  * Maryanne St. Denis, Manager, Content and Communications, Brock University mstdenis@brocku.ca or 905-246-0256

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  Categories: Media releases