Bear Creek Elementary 24-25
OUR CONTEXT
At Bear Creek Elementary, we are committed to providing a welcoming school environment where staff work collaboratively with families and community partners to support the whole child. We continuously strive to build a culture that respects the diversity of our students and honors each student’s unique story. Our community is deeply connected to and acknowledges that we live, work, play, and learn on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Katzie, Kwantlen, Semiahmoo, and other Coast Salish Peoples.
We are committed to supporting and empowering our students by providing opportunities that help them feel safe, nurtured, and inspired to thrive both in and out of the classroom. In partnership with Community Schools, students can engage in a variety of enriching programs, including GIA (Girls in Action), the PAWS After-School Program, and Star Power. Our focus is on fostering student confidence and leadership and creating meaningful opportunities for them to make a positive impact within their school and community.
In addition to extracurricular programs, we offer engaging, hands-on learning experiences through ADST (Applied Design, Skills and Technologies). In our Learning Commons, students explore coding, experiment with 3D printing, and build essential skills in creativity, innovation, and problem-solving, skills that will serve them well in an ever-evolving world.
Students in both the primary and intermediate grades are invited to join Choir and the Recorder Karate Club, while intermediate students can also participate in extracurricular sports such as soccer, volleyball, basketball, badminton, and track and field.
At Bear Creek, student connection is nurtured through a heartwarming initiative known as Adam’s Apples. Each day, many students visit the office to receive two apples, one for themselves and one to share with a friend. This simple act of giving encourages kindness, strengthens relationships, and helps build a more connected and caring school community.
Bear Creek students have a strong passion for literacy and a genuine love of reading. We nurture this enthusiasm by providing quality literature and resources that support learning across all curricular areas. Last year, our school was honored to receive the Indigo Love of Reading Grant, which will provide us with $75,000 worth of books and literacy materials over the next three years.
We aim to foster the development of engaged, holistic, and resilient learners by equipping students with the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values they need to thrive in a rapidly changing world.
OUR LEARNERS
Reading fluency and comprehension play a crucial role in our learners’ overall academic success and confidence. We know that proficient readers engage with a variety of texts, understand what they read, and can critically reflect. However, before learners can become proficient readers, they must first be fluent readers. Fluency involves mastering the foundations of decoding, word recognition, language structures, and phonological awareness. These reading elements combined with reading accuracy, rate, and automaticity are the main ingredients that make for a proficient fluent reader. Reading fluency can be described as the bridge between decoding and comprehension (Rasinski, 2003). As our learners improve their ability to decode, they also become more fluent.
Our learners can use foundational reading strategies and skills to decode words, recognize word patterns, and understand text.
We support this development through daily UFLI instruction. Below is an image of Vowel Valley, one of the tools students use to strengthen their phonics skills and build words.
Our learners are building their confidence around reading.
Students experiencing success in reading are more likely to develop a positive attitude towards learning in general. As our learners grow their reading skills and fluency, they are motivated to read more, and the positive cycle continues.
Our learners find joy and creativity in books and texts, which improves reading success.
Our school is part of a District-wide Joy of Reading project. The goal is to make reading more fun by giving students more access to books, more choice in what they read, and more chances to be part of a reading community. Teachers and Teacher-Librarians will work together to help build a love of reading through activities like book tastings, book talks, and by adding more student-recommended books to our library collection. As we know, the highest predictor of later success in school is enjoyment of reading as reading opens the door to learning (Gutierrez-de-Rozas et al., 2022).
Our learners are growing their independence.
Reading fluency is essential for independent learning. Our learners who read fluently are better equipped to study on their own, conduct research, and engage with various types of written materials independently.
All learners can develop literacy skills to communicate, understand, and connect with the world around them.
All of our learners are developing their literacy skills in unique ways. We meet each student where they are and support their growth through daily reading and meaningful learning experiences, helping them build the confidence, curiosity, and skills they need to connect with the world through language.
OUR FOCUS
Our school is continuing to prioritize, for the second year, reading fluency as a key area of learning. Fluency, the ability to read with accuracy, efficiency, and expression, is essential for comprehension and overall literacy success. In the early years, building accuracy and automaticity lays the foundation for fluent reading, and research supports focusing on these skills early (Hudson et al., 2005; Schwanenflugel et al., 2006). However, fluency remains important in the upper intermediate grades, where students must apply these skills to more complex texts across subjects. Continued fluency development helps students read with confidence, deepen their understanding, and engage more fully with academic content.
The Learning Standard we are focusing on:
Use a variety of comprehension strategies, specifically fluency, during reading to deepen understanding of text.
We closely monitored two groups of primary and intermediate students to pinpoint their achievements and areas needing improvement in fluency. Data was collected in the early fall of 2024, and again at the end of May 2025.
OUR NEXT STEPS
To support our learners in developing reading fluency, strategies such as repeated reading, modeling fluent reading, choral reading, vocabulary instruction, paragraph shrinking and partner reading were facilitated in whole class and small group settings. Early identification and intervention for struggling readers was and continues to be essential.
It is demonstrated, through evidence gathered from our cohort of primary and intermediate students, that our fluency focus is positively impacting learners, however, more so at the primary level. Language from the provincial assessment scales was used to identify successes and remaining challenges.
As noted in the above chart, students progressed in reading fluency. In using a variety of comprehension strategies, specifically fluency, during reading to deepen understanding of text, there was a 42% increase in the number of primary students identified as being “proficient” with the provincial assessment language and guidelines.
The differentiated approach to reading fluency in Grades 1 and 2, delivered through whole-class instruction, LST small groups, and with the Early Literacy teacher, has resulted in significant growth in reading. The consistent, routine-based structure has been particularly effective for students who typically face challenges, helping to build their confidence and increase classroom engagement. The integration of UFLI materials has further enhanced student success by clearly identifying targeted skills, which also makes it easier for parents to support learning at home. As a result, students are decoding with confidence, taking greater risks in their learning, and showing genuine excitement about reading and word discovery. This has fostered a positive and empowering literacy environment for all learners.
For the intermediate cohort, there was only a 5% increase in the number of students identified as being “proficient.” There was also a 5% decrease in the number of students identified as “emerging.”
The intermediate cohort did not demonstrate as much growth as the primary cohort, largely due to the absence of targeted intervention. As students’ progress through the grades, needs begin to vary significantly. Gaps in foundational skills tend to widen, making it more challenging to implement targeted support, as students are often at very different levels. This variation made highlighting the need for more flexible and responsive intervention strategies at the intermediate level.
After achieving fluency in reading, students can direct their efforts and attention to more advanced comprehension tasks, enabling them to engage more deeply with texts. Here is a sample of a student from the primary cohort who made great gains throughout the year in reading fluency.
Continuing the Journey
At Bear Creek Elementary, we are proud of the progress our students have made in increasing their fluency skills. Based on evidence of students’ progress in relation to our learning goals, our next steps will include:
- Continuing to embrace fluency and intentionally use instructional strategies to allow opportunities for students to further build their fluency skills.
- Provide students who are extending in fluency and comprehension ways to grow as a reader and develop their skills even further.
- Provide targeted support to intermediate students who demonstrate challenges with fluency and explore models that focus on target support for intermediate students.
- For the 2025-2026 school year, we will continue to expand our cohort, and data will be gathered from both primary and intermediate grade levels to gain a school-wide perspective on comprehension and fluency of students across all grades. We will aim to increase the number of students proficient in reading fluency to over 50%.
At Bear Creek, we are dedicated to ensuring that all students acquire the literacy skills and competencies essential for success in school and beyond. As we continually monitor, reflect, and refine our learning plan, we will also prioritize the equitable distribution of instruction, time, and resources focusing on supporting and reaching our most vulnerable learners.
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.
