Working toward her doctorate in reading while teaching second grade at Meadowcreek Elementary School in Norcross, GA, Kelly Stopp goes to great lengths to help her students gain literacy skills. Stopp even lived with a native family in Costa Rica for six weeks to learn Spanish so she could communicate with her predominately Hispanic students and families.
Stopp’s signature classroom practices include Guided Reading, Reader’s Theater and Readers and Writers Workshop. She creates poetry and songbooks, and uses grammar lesson mini- books to preview skills. Eager to experiment with and model new instructional methods, she crafted a program that merges poetry with grammar and social studies. More than 90 percent of her students—68 percent of whom are English as a Second Language (ESL) speakers—passed the second-grade reading portion of the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT). For the past three years, more than 80 percent of her second graders posted reading scores that were at or above grade level.
As a second-grade reading specialist, Stopp extends her impact by sharing her professional development in literacy techniques with teachers throughout her school. Always abreast of education policy developments, Stopp spearheads professional development that connects across curricula. She created a grammar lesson booklet which is now used countywide. She even organized a team to transform two reading rooms into an “excellent and valuable staff resource,” coming in during spring and summer breaks to ensure it was ready—and displaying the first-rate commitment for which she is so well-known.
