Post two in a five-part series exploring the question:

“What does it mean to be college-ready?” and “How do we help our students become college and career-ready?”

Rather than presenting a lot of rubrics defining college readiness, let’s look at a real-world example of what happens: Our student walks into her first college class and the professor says, “You have a paper due in three weeks.” Even though she has her high school Regents diploma, her paper is weak on basic writing skills like spelling, grammar, sentence structure and organization of ideas. Her paper gets a failing grade and the professor recommends her to remedial English.

So how do we support our students and partner schools in this area?

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of this problem. At Creative Connections, we’re trying to integrate reading and writing into every activity – in small and manageable bites.

A great example of this is one of our after school art programs, in which the large majority of students are English Language Learners. At our recent holiday family night, students presented their artwork. They were also required to write about the process and what influenced their work, then read what they had written for their parents, teachers and peers.

This process not only boosts students’ confidence as artists, but helps lay a foundation on which to build their writing abilities and prepare them for that first college paper.

At Creative Connections, we consider literacy and writing ability key to career- and college-readiness, and continually seek innovative, enjoyable ways to ignite a love of learning in our students.