JAY – Third-graders sat in a circle at a table in the center of the library as literary specialist Darlene Bassett asked them to take chunks of letters such as “st” or “art” and stretch them to make words.

Teachers from several different school systems sat at tables around them to observe and record their findings on the sliding-word technique.

Bassett, who has her own literacy consulting business, Best Practices International, has been working with teachers from five of 11 school systems involved in Western Maine Education Collaborative to coach them on literacy techniques.

The two-year literacy initiative targets grades three through eight.

Those teachers then go back to their schools and mentor teachers there who in turn work with students with Bassett coming into continue coaching.

On Thursday, lessons were being conducted under Bassett’s guidance.

Jay Elementary School mentor and teacher, Nancy Anctil’s fourth-graders had demonstrated a literacy activity earlier in the day to the teachers.

They concentrated on a nonfiction book they read “The Underground Railroad.”

Each student takes a role in the activity.

Demonstrators this day were Alex Kennedy, the connector, Paige Butterfield, the summarizer, Lucas Choate, the word wizard, Brianna Hebert, the predictor and evaluator and Lea Machnitzky, the questioner.

This particular technique increases their comprehension of the story, Anctil said. She finds that students are reading more nonfiction stories than they did before.

“It helps us learn. It tells us how they did it back then,” Hebert said.

The predictor’s job is to predict what they think the story is about, she said.

The predictions are not always right, Hebert said.

Machnitzky predicted the slaves escaped through long, dark tunnels using the graphic on the cover of the book that appeared to be a bright light from a lantern or a candle.

But the story turned out to be different.

Machnitzy’s job as a questioner was to question part of the text and tell what she thought it meant. One question was why did both black and white people risk their lives to help slaves escape.

Machnitzy said Kennedy thought it was because some farmers and white people thought it was wrong to have slaves.

Kennedy’s job as a connector is to make connections from text to world, text to self and text to text. Among his connections were Mexican immigrants and Harriet Tubman.

As a summarizer, Butterfield said she has to summarize what they read at the start, middle and end and asks if everybody agrees with her.

Word wizard Kennedy said he picks three important words from the text and those area underground railroad, slaves and free states, and conductors of the underground railroad.

The school systems participating in the literacy project – Jay, Winthrop, SAD 9 in Farmington, SAD 36 in Livermore Falls and SAD 43 in Mexico – share the costs for the training which is less than $10,000 each, WMEC Executive Director Mona Baker said.

It’s a savings of $150,000 to do the training together, she said. Combined the cost is less than $50,000.