It’s a sunny afternoon right after school in September as elementary-aged kids and their parents arrive at Soddy-Daisy Community Library for weekly storytime.
Children plop onto couches arranged in a semi-circle, busy themselves with blocks at a nearby table, and pull books from the shelves to flip through while they wait for things to begin.
Kelly Flemings, the education and outreach coordinator at the small community library outside of Chattanooga, passes out snacks to the assembled group. “I learned something super cool this week, and I’m so excited to share it with you,” he tells them.
The book he reads—The Soda Bottle School, by Laura Kutner and Suzanne Slade—tells the true story of a community project to build a school out of recycled bottles in Granados, a village in Guatemala. It’s classic storytime fare, with characters around the kids’ ages and bright, colorful illustrations. But the book wasn’t a random selection.
It was recommended as part of a literacy toolkit, designed by the nonprofit Chattanooga 2.0 to help after-school programs and community organizations reinforce what students learn in classrooms in the Hamilton County, Tenn., school district.
The toolkit, which draws from the district’s curriculum, is also used in Chattanooga Public Library branches and other after-school programs across the community.
It’s not unusual for libraries to offer academic enrichment. But this approach is more targeted.
The book Flemings read, The Soda Bottle School, ties into a 2nd grade theme in the district’s curriculum—schools and the community. At the library, a special display offers books on the different topics kids are studying in class, segmented by grade and academic quarter. “Support Your Child’s Learning!” it reads, directing 1st grade parents to books about the solar system and 4th grade parents to texts on the American Revolution and the 19th Amendment.
Driving this model is “instructional coherence”—the notion that all parts of a child’s learning experience, from the curriculum their teacher uses to the tutoring they get after school, should complement each other and work toward the same goals.
This approach in Hamilton County, located in southeastern Tennessee, takes that idea one step further, asking: What if that coherence extended outside of school, too? What would it take to pull that off? And could it help students become better readers?
How the toolkit works
The literacy toolkit aims to build on what’s going on in school—not replicate the school day, said Brandon Hubbard-Heitz, the chief strategy officer and literacy lead for Chattanooga 2.0, the local nonprofit that created it. The group works with the school system and organizations across the area, supporting education, early childhood, and pathways to livable-wage jobs.
The document outlines how the district’s English/language arts curriculum works in elementary school, and draws on supplemental materials in grades K-2 to suggest a host of activities tied to each grade level—including read-alouds, engineering labs, and art projects. All come with suggestions on how to plan the activities and learning goals.
Chattanooga 2.0 also hosted training for out-of-school-time program operators, explaining the basics of how reading instruction works in the early grades.
The nonprofit’s approach represents the “gold standard” in developing meaningful connections between the school day and after-school programming, said Jodi Grant, the executive director of the Afterschool Alliance.
Back at Soddy-Daisy Community Library in September, Flemings peppered his read-aloud with questions, encouraging kids to make connections between their own school and the school in the book. He paused to define new words and translate some of the Spanish on the pages.
The storytime group is tailored for grades K-2, but older kids sometimes show up, and others bring their toddler siblings, Flemings said. Depending on the age of the children, the topics might be a preview of topics they’ll study soon, or a review of what they’ve already learned. Both have benefits, in Flemings’ view.
“I’ve heard their parents or a teacher tell me they came in [to school] and knew something before we were supposed to study it, so that was really great,” he said, in an interview. But when kids already know a lot about a topic, they have a chance to flex their knowledge, he added.
Take the topic of birds, which kids in Hamilton County study in 1st grade.
“I’m like, ‘Well, what do you know about a bird’s body?’ And I’ll leave it as open-ended as possible,” Flemings said. “They will give me everything back that they learned. The pride they have in knowing that, and a grown-up is listening to them and being excited for them to know it, it makes a big difference.”
Early elementary kids are “little sponges,” he continued. “They’re going to soak it up. But they also need to be able to release that, and have it appreciated.”
The toolkit shapes all the K-2 storytime programming at Soddy-Daisy Community Library. The city library system uses the resource in slightly different ways, said Lee Hope, the assistant director of youth services and community engagement at the Chattanooga Public Library.
While the library has collaborated with the school system for almost 15 years, the toolkit has sharpened that focus, Hope said.
When schools take field trips to the library, part of the day’s activities include art and engineering labs from the toolkit. Some of the labs are also integrated into the library’s after-school STEAM programs.
“We make everything fun. That’s not saying that schools don’t, but they have so much to get through all day every day,” Hope said. At the library, she continued, “The kids don’t even know they’re learning. We just slide that in.”
Other districts don’t need to ‘reinvent the wheel’
Test scores are on the rise in Hamilton County schools, but there’s no concrete data yet that could determine whether connecting out-of-school time programming to classroom learning is at all responsible.
But in theory, it could deepen children’s knowledge about the concepts they’re being taught in class—a key component of reading comprehension ability, said Ashley Rogers Berner, the director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy.
Studies show that children who have a broader knowledge base about the world around them tend to do better on tests of reading comprehension than similar peers.
If other districts wanted to launch a similar collaboration, there are models in Chattanooga and beyond to turn to, said Grant, of the Afterschool Alliance. “I don’t think anyone needs to reinvent the wheel on this,” she said.
Grant referenced ExpandED Schools, which supports more than 900 after-school and community programs in New York City, and provides resources for literacy learning, STEM education, and high-impact tutoring.
She also noted another Tennessee coalition, the Nashville After Zone Alliance, which provides training and professional development for out-of-school-time programs, along with other support.
In Hamilton County, a few specifics about the school system made it possible to get the toolkit off the ground, said Hubbard-Heitz of Chattanooga 2.0.
The district has used one common curriculum in elementary schools since 2018, meaning the content in the toolkit would be relevant for kids in after-school programs regardless of the campus they attended. State reading legislation passed a few years ago doubled down on the focus on literacy, and built a shared understanding of best practices that Chattanooga 2.0 could then introduce to after-school providers and community organizations.
“You’ve got to have the right on-the-ground conditions so that you’re not swimming upstream,” Hubbard-Heitz said.
