Course gives a head start

Bertha Garcia knows quite a few more English words than she did at

the beginning of the summer. In fact, she knows approximately 350

more -- and she’s hung them on a classroom wall to prove it.

The 12-year-old Costa Mesa resident, who will enter the seventh

grade at Ensign Intermediate School next month, participated this

summer in Jump Start on Junior High, a preparatory class for students

making the transition from elementary school.

On Tuesday, the Newport-Mesa Unified School District held a

luncheon at Ensign to celebrate the end of the course, and

instructors handed out awards to students -- including one to Bertha,

whose 350 words led her class.

“First I read some books, and when I came to words I didn’t

understand, I was curious what they meant,” said Bertha, whose

vocabulary sheets on the wall included “nightingales,” “vagueness”

and “latecomers.”

Bertha was among 14 former Rea Elementary School students honored

Tuesday for completing the Jump Start class, a first-year summer

program. During the five weeks of the course, students learned to

write summaries of short stories, tried advanced methods of

note-taking and read a portion of Stephen Covey’s best-selling book

“The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.”

Jump Start on Junior High is the brainchild of Julie Chan, the

director of literary instruction for Newport-Mesa. She conceived the

course as an affiliate of Read 180, a nationwide reading program for

middle school and high school students that Newport-Mesa has offered

since 2003.

While the district has offered Read 180 -- which serves seventh-

through 12th-graders who are two or more years behind their grade

level in reading -- for the last three years, Chan said the program

is often sparsely attended during the summer months.

“It’s a real hard sell to get kids to come back to school after

summer begins by saying, ‘This is a reading program,’ but it was easy

to tell the parents, ‘Your kids are going to get a head start on

junior high with these skills,’” Chan said.

The summer course at Ensign also served as training for faculty

who will be leading the Read 180 program in the near future. Rea

sixth-grade teachers Amy Medina and Alida Castaneda, whose school

will be the only elementary site offering Read 180 this fall, led the

class.

At the Tuesday luncheon, Medina handed out prizes to students for

their achievements. Luis Ramirez led the class by reading 924 pages,

while Luz Alvarez set another mark by writing 2,051 words for class.

Fatima Gutierrez, who said she hadn’t been a compulsive reader before

the summer class, listened to six novels by audiotape in July and

August -- totaling 1,166 minutes.

“I looked on the cover and on the back where they had a small

summary, and they looked interesting to me,” said Fatima, 12.

* MICHAEL MILLER may be reached at

o7michael.miller@latimes.comf7.