As you likely know, the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act provides $2.75 billion for the Emergency Assistance to Non-Public Schools (EANS) program. EANS grants provide help to eligible non-public schools to address COVID’s impact on students and teachers, including learning loss.
How can your school use its grant most productively to not only blunt the impact of learning loss, but move past it? And how can Catholic Textbook Project help you in that endeavor—in a way that we’re exceptionally positioned to do?
One of the most effective ways to confront learning loss is to build literacy skills. Advances in reading will elevate everything from vocabulary to sentence structure, from comprehension to critical thinking. Good students will show enhanced results, while marginal students will exhibit a truly powerful change. So how can you build literacy skills—and quicker, deeper learning overall—in the most efficient way possible?
The answer is to work with different modes of learning, and that’s something for which our history books at Catholic Textbook Project are ideally suited. They are written in an engaging narrative format that draws students into a real, compelling story, which is a crucial starting point because children by nature want to hear, read, and tell stories. Our “story” approach to history gently pulls children into a comprehension of facts, words, and the structural meaning of grammar.
While absorbing fascinating tales of people, communities, and nations, students also learn to ask deeper questions about motives and decisions, and what it means to make a good or bad choice. This synergy stimulates cross-hemispherical brain activity that builds neural architecture at an accelerated rate. In other words, this is learning that structurally changes the brain—and a student will not only recover from learning loss quickly, but gain a new capacity for learning.
Moreover, students studying with our textbooks learn to see themselves as part of a unified citizenry. That’s not only good for the student, but also for the American society of which they’ll someday take the helm. In sum, Catholic Textbook Project tells the whole story to build up the whole child, not only making us unique among school publishers but putting us at the forefront of learning science.
As you use all the resources at hand to strengthen your classrooms in the wake of the pandemic, resolve to be a visionary leader—and know that we stand uniquely ready to help you lead. If you have questions or would like samples of our books, please contact us. You may also view digital samples of our books at this page.
Putting hand to pen and then pen to paper is the best way to create new neural pathways. What you see yourself writing sparks the brain all over again. Speaking aloud is another sensory input. Even a century ago people still read by reading aloud. And a family that reads aloud together, learns together! Andrew Pudewa at Institute for Excellence in Writing has done a writing program to help students drive the Think, Speak, Write, and Read cycle. The books at CTP are perfect source material for that.