Beaver Creek Elementary

What is Literacy? 

“At its simplest, literacy is the way that we interact with the world around us, how we shape it and are shaped by it. It is how we communicate with others via reading and writing, but also by speaking, listening, and creating. It is how we articulate our experience in the world and declare, “We Are Here!”” – Amber Peterson, National Council of Teachers of English

At Beaver Creek Elementary our goal is to foster a love of reading, to bring about an inclusive environment that recognizes the diversity and beauty of reading. Reading can look different over the course of the day and when we experience reading in different ways we are given opportunities to strengthen and deepen our understanding.

Students "acquire information from a variety of sources, including people, print materials, and media; this may involve listening, viewing, or reading, and requires understanding of how to interpret information." - BC Curriculum - Core Competency - Communication

Reading a story out loud gives opportunities for all learners to share in an experience and have meaningful discussions about the story or non-fiction texts.

Reading a novel together as a group, gives us all a chance to practice reading out loud and share our thoughts, ideas, connections, questions and wonders.

Buddy and partner reading is another way we can work on reading. This is also an opportunity for students to share their ideas, predictions and understandings.

Other times, we find a quiet spot and read independently.

We even use technology to explore, learn and engage with reading.

"Exploring stories and other texts helps us understand ourselves and make connections to others and to the world." - BC Curriculum, Big Ideas, English Language Arts 6

Our goal for students at Beaver Creek is for them to demonstrate a desire and appreciation for reading, along with becoming proficient readers. We aim to inspire our students to find time to read and choose it as a preferred activity. Students will also demonstrate the ability to talk about what they reading with their friends, classmates and families. Demonstrating the ability to talk about what we are reading means that students can retell main ideas, recognize favourite events, ask questions, make connections, make pictures in their minds about the events of the stories and texts.  

To reach our goal, we will be focusing on the grade 2 students and follow their progress over the next few years as they all prepare to transition to high school.

What our Students are Saying and Doing

"When I read, I see pictures in my mind." - Grade 4 student

"Reading is fun.  It teaches you more words. It makes me feel happy and I like reading fun stories." - Grade 1 student

"Sometimes I make connections that have actually happened in my life." - Grade 4 student

"I don't read because I am forced to, I read because I enjoy it." - Grade 6 student

"I like to read game books and non-fiction." - Grade 2 student

"I like reading funny books that make me laugh." - Grade 4 student

"I especially like novels and graphic novels because they let you use your imagination." - Grade 5 student

"If you have a good book, I would read it during my free time." - Grade 6 student

Our goal for students at Beaver Creek is for them to demonstrate a desire and appreciation for reading, along with becoming proficient readers. It is our hope that be fostering a love of reading we will create engaged, critically thinking learners.  Students who enjoy reading are more likely to read.  Students who have developed comprehension skills and strategies to understand and think deeply about what they read, are more likely to continue reading and make it part of their daily lives.  

To understand where we are, we conducted a survey in primary and intermediate classes.  Students were asked two questions:

1. Who likes to read?
2. Who reads everyday?

The results of these two simple questions can be found below.

When we look at our grade group cohort's reading results, we see where we are starting from, as many students are at or above grade level.

What stands out from looking closely at these two results, is that at the primary level, students are excited and enthusiastic about reading and that they spend a lot of time reading.  For our intermediate students we found the opposite, fewer like to read and fewer spend time reading or are unsure what counts as reading.

Our first hunch is that in primary classrooms, students spend a lot of time reading, learning to read, talking about reading and sharing in a variety of reading experiences.  When you are reading all the time, talking about what you are reading, it is fresh in your mind and something you would choose to do.

As students go through primary and become intermediate students, there is shift in perspective.  In the intermediate classes we are no longer learning to read, but are now reading to learn.  This distinctive shift invites more independence in the reading process and may contribute to students not recognizing what counts as reading. How can we help students acknowledge the reading they are doing and help them build upon the skills and strategies they developed in their primary?

“When I was in primary I didn’t get homework.  As I get more homework now, I have less time to read.” -  Grade 6 student

How do students think about reading? Is reading an activity you do alone in a quiet room? What about your homework? Are intermediate students being active readers at home and simply not recognizing it? Part of our next step is to work with our intermediate students to figure out and understand what they are counting as reading and come up with a ways we can all recognize and increase our engagement with reading.

As we move forward and follow our grade 2 cohort, we will continue to build on the work of developing proficient readers.  Good readers talk about what they are reading, they ask questions, they visualize, they predict and wonder about themselves and the world around them.

We will continue to encourage the love of reading in our learners.  Reading is an important part of our day in the classroom and there are many opportunities that we will continue to experience reading. As we begin to delve deeply into our reading goal we will continue to conducted a survey of students' feelings towards reading and have them set goals for themselves.