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LAVALLETTE — Five gifted fifth- and sixth-graders from Lavallette Elementary School meet each week with Superintendent/Principal Lisa Gleason for a reading enrichment session in which they dissect a specially chosen novel together. The Ocean Star was invited to one of these sessions last Wednesday to observe the talented middle-schoolers in action.
The five students, sixth-graders Giselle Rivera, Addyson Costello and Dean Guattare and fifth-graders Benjamin Friedstein and Grayson Costello, attend the weekly session, dubbed the ACES [Accelerated Curricular Enrichment for Students] reading group. In each of these sessions, the readers discuss a book in-depth and analyze it at a more advanced level than the class might in their day-to-day courses.
Currently, the students are reading Theodore Taylor’s 1969 novel “The Cay.” “The Cay,” which the students note is pronounced like “key,” tells the story of Phillip, a young white boy living on the island of Curaçao, and Timothy, a Black Caribbean man, who become stranded at sea after the ship they were aboard is torpedoed during World War II. The novel discusses themes of racism and prejudice, themes which are not lost upon the ACES students.
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One element of the reading group is the use of Google Classroom to organize the readers’ thoughts into discussions. For this session, the discussion question was, “In ‘The Cay’ we see instances where prejudice is present. Research the word ‘prejudice.’ In what ways is prejudice present in the novel?”
“Prejudice kind of means to judge someone by their background,” said Grayson. “Without even knowing how they act, or what their personality is, just how they look or how people are describing them … In the beginning of the book when Phillip and Henrik [his best friend] were in Curaçao they went down to Sint Anna Bay and would play with the Black men, and when they came home the mom would get mad at them because she would think they’re bad.”
This is an excerpt of the print article. For more on this story, read The Ocean Star—on newsstands Friday or online in our e-Edition.
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