Adams Road Elementary 24-25
OUR CONTEXT
Welcome to Adams Road Elementary!
We are Adams Road Elementary—where hearts and minds grow together! Nestled in the heart of Surrey’s vibrant Cloverdale/Clayton community, our school is a place where every child is seen, heard, and celebrated. We are proud to learn and grow on the traditional, unceded, and shared territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the Katzie, Kwantlen, and Semiahmoo Nations. We are privileged to work, play, and learn on their beautiful lands.
At Adams Road, our mission is to create a safe, inclusive, and empowering environment where students thrive through connection, creativity, and curiosity. Since opening our doors in 2010, we’ve built a strong, supportive community of passionate educators, engaged families, and enthusiastic learners. Our students shine with strong collaborative and communication skills, and a spirit of exploration that fuels their learning journey.
We believe in celebrating every child’s identity and strengths and fostering a sense of belonging that extends beyond the classroom. Whether it’s through hands-on learning, social-emotional growth, or community events, Adams Road is a place where learning is joyful and every success is shared.
Our students love sports, and are up for any challenge you present to them- rugby, pickleball, balloon stomping at Sports Day- you name it! We love to be active, and we love being a part of a team. We are also performers- actors, dancers, and singers. We love to create, build and invent, and most of all, we love being part of a community- to learn with our friends, our families, and our wider community. This is what it means to be a part of Adams Road.
OUR LEARNERS
At Adams Road Elementary, our school-wide goal is to nurture strong, confident readers and communicators—because literacy is the foundation for all learning and a powerful tool for self-expression, connection, and critical thinking. Across all grades, students engage in rich, meaningful literacy experiences that build their skills and spark their curiosity. In Kindergarten, learners explore sounds and symbols through playful storytelling and phonemic games. In Grade 3, students dive into inquiry projects, using nonfiction texts to ask big questions and share their discoveries. In Grade 7, our learners can analyze diverse texts, make thoughtful inferences, and express their ideas with clarity and purpose. At every level, Adams Road students are empowered to see themselves as capable, creative, and growing readers and writers.
This year, our school has been diving deeper into literacy instruction and assessment, particularly in the primary grades. We are spending our Professional Development days as well after school sessions learning about new ways to teach phonics and early reading skills. We are bringing in helping teachers to teach us new district and provincial assessments with the intent of helping our youngest students become strong readers from the very beginning.
OUR FOCUS
This year, we wanted to go deeper in our literacy instruction, and have focused our inquiry on a group of 28 Grade 1 students who are receiving learning support. 25% of these students were English Language Learners.
Our focus has been helping struggling readers to read at grade level by:
- improving their phonemic awareness skills (the ability to break words down into their individual sounds and to blend individual sounds into whole words)
- improving their phonological awareness skills (the ability to hear and create rhyming words, break the flow of speech into separate words, and hear syllables as “chunks” in spoken words)
In order to achieve these goals, our Learning Support Team used a new phonics program to explicitly teach these skills. Students in our focus group received learning assistance five days a week for 30 minutes at a time. They received explicit instruction in these phonological and phonemic awareness skills, and were assessed each term on their knowledge of specific sounds.
We hoped to see this group move closer to grade level proficiency in reading. We were specifically interested in how many students progressed from one reading level to the next level based on criteria set by the Learning Support Team.
OUR NEXT STEPS
Our evidence:
Students were assessed at the end of Terms 1, 2, and 3 using a district phonics assessment. In Term 1, teachers were looking to see how many alphabet sounds they knew, as well as how many simple CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words they could read, such as 'cat'. By the beginning of Gr. 1, students should know almost all of their alphabet letters and may be beginning to read one or two CVC words.
There were three levels of reading groups- an Emerging Literacy Group, a Developing Reading Group, and a Proficient Reading group. The team collected data on each student in the cohort, and tracked which students stayed at their current level of phonemic awareness skills, and which students moved into the next level. The criteria changed each term and there was a higher target to hit, so students moving into a new group is an accomplishment to celebrate. Our goal of Learning Support is that student move out of it and no longer require this level of targeted intervention.
From the end of Term 1 to Term 2, 32% of students improved their reading skills enough to move up into a new reading group. From Term 2 to Term 3, 50% of students improved enough to move up at least one level of reading group, and some even jumped up two levels. By the end of the year, 64% of this Grade 1 cohort were at a Developing or Proficient reading level on their final report card, which means they were reading within grade level expectations. This growth was very significant, and we feel due largely in part to teaching explicit phonics skills.
We are encouraged by this growth in reading skills, and will continue to support this group of students as they move into Grade 2. Our focus next year will be to support those students who are still reading at an emerging level to move up to a developing level. We will continue to use this phonics program as all students showed noticeable growth and improvement. We are also looking at ways to provide in-class support to teachers to help provide more in-class reading support.
Surrey Schools
Formed in 1906, the Surrey School District currently has the largest student enrolment in British Columbia and is one of the few growing districts in the province. It is governed by a publicly elected board of seven trustees.
The district serves the cities of Surrey and White Rock and the rural area of Barnston Island.
