Achieve3000® and Virginia Beach City Public Schools have partnered to create Smarty Summer: Diving into Early Literacy, a new kindergarten reading readiness initiative exclusively for Virginia Beach students. Under this initiative, children who will be starting kindergarten in fall 2016 will receive a free summer subscription to Smarty Ants®, a research-based literacy program designed for young learners.
Virginia Beach City Public Schools is the second-largest school division in Virginia, with 55 elementary schools, 15 middle schools, 12 high schools, and a number of secondary/post-secondary specialty centers. In 2014, the division superintendent, Dr. Aaron Spence, spearheaded a five-year strategic plan to prepare and empower every student to become a life-long 21st-century learner, which includes implementing a personalized learning approach at all school levels.
Smarty Ants is a foundational literacy program for grades PreK-1 that teaches children how to read in an online environment. The adaptive content system automatically evaluates each student’s skills and preferences to deliver the correct level of instruction. As students engage with the program through their customizable avatar, their success is recognized with virtual awards and mini-games.
The Virginia Edition of Achieve3000’s eScience3000® – an experiential, differentiated core science program – is also being used in the division’s middle school science classrooms. Both the Pro and eScience3000 solutions have been customized by Achieve3000’s instructional advisors to align with the Virginia Beach’s learning objectives for the each grade level and subject area.
