Hjorth Road Elementary
OUR CONTEXT
Hjorth Road Elementary is a small, vibrant school located within a culturally rich, multi-lingual community. Our students are proud of their school and greet new learners and visitors to our building with excitement, warmth and deep interest. Our learners bring many life experiences to our classrooms at Hjorth Road and together we have much to learn from each other. New experiences are embraced with a sense of wonder and we believe in demonstrating empathy and respect for all learners. We have a strong sense of belonging, are proud of our diverse community and truly believe, ‘There’s No Place Like Hjorth’.
During our school day, our students and staff celebrate an inclusive learning environment and feel strongly about supporting our diverse learners. A strong sense of community brings our students together and this builds friendships, promotes tolerance and creates a feeling of belonging. We work closely with Community Schools Partnership and, together with our Outreach Worker, our students participate in many lunchtime and after-school programs, such as Blast, Canada Scores, Scores In Action and Game Ready. At our recent ‘Hjorth in Action Fair’, the strong entrepreneur skills and charitable mindsets of our students were evident as they raised money for a worthy cause in our community - the Rec for Kids Society.
Our students learn best through real-world, hands-on learning experiences and are excited to engage in inquiry projects, particularly those that focus on building, creating and utilizing outdoor experiences. Students continue to build a Growth Mindset when learning and are recognizing that we are all on this learning journey together. Teachers too!
We love exploring our local parks and green spaces, such as Hawthorne Park and Hjorth Park, and have been fortunate to enjoy learning experiences further afield at Crescent Beach, Sasamat Lake, Galiano Island, the Vancouver Zoo and the Surrey Museum.
Our students are positive, creative, energetic and eager to celebrate each day at Hjorth Road. Together, as a school community, we enjoy participating in school-theme days such as Pink shirt: Anti-Bullying Day, Orange shirt: Every Child Matters, the Terry Fox Run, and Pride Spirit Day. We celebrate our school and each other by planting daffodil bulbs, painting a City of Surrey snow plow and running together in our daily Hjorth Jog. Leadership activities are returning alongside sports activities and our students enjoy delivering the morning announcements, supporting classes as lunch monitors and taking part in team activities such as Track and Field.
“We are a very collaborative and inclusive school. I truly believe our students feel welcome at Hjorth and that our teachers do a great job of building meaningful connections with each learner.”
“Every child matters and that undergirds everything this staff does. Accommodations are made for religious practices and children are given extra support in reading and writing”.
“I feel we are very in tune with all the diversities in our school community and try our best to celebrate them so that our students feel heard and seen.”
OUR LEARNERS
Literacy is a fundamental life skill. It is the ability to read, write, speak, and think in a way that lets us communicate effectively and make sense of the world. Communication – a core competency embedded across all areas of learning in BC’s curriculum – is central to supporting our learners develop their literacy skills as they collaborate, problem solve, share ideas, exchange information, and express their individuality. Evidence of our learners' many gifts, attributes, and competencies are highlighted below.
Our learners can exchange ideas and perspectives to build shared understanding.
This year, our intermediate students participated in the Great Canadian Mail Race and wrote letters to students at another school in Canada. By engaging in the letter-writing process, our intermediate group of students shared personal stories, proofread their work, edited for clarity, and added “triple scoop words” for interest and to engage the reader.
Our learners can explore oral storytelling processes.
Through the use of loose parts, our primary students demonstrate an understanding of story structure and orally share their stories to build vocal expression and create meaning. This activity is an engaging and fundamental literacy-building block that transfers hands-on learning into oral and written expression.
Our learners can use developmentally appropriate reading, listening and viewing strategies to make meaning.
Each year, our students enjoy reading and creating visual representations of the story, The Dot by Peter H Reynolds. Students school-wide participate in literacy activities that culminate in a visual arts representation of their learning.
Supporting Literacy Development at Hjorth Road
While social-emotional learning will continue to be embedded into the fabric of our school environment, we wish to continue building interest and skills in literacy through reading and writing development. Students enjoy exploring literacy within their classrooms with Words Their Way word sorts, Epic Books, and Daily 5 activities. In addition, our students particularly enjoy engaging in Literacy Circles, Guided Reading, novel studies, noisy reading, quiet reading, read-aloud's, and audio books.
Our students love reading and are excited to explore the new resources in our classrooms and Library Learning Commons. Through a generous donation from the Indigo Grant, our Library Learning Commons has expanded our school’s collection of high-interest literature to promote interest in books, build positive literacy habits, and connect the learning at school with the learning at home.
In addition to the Indigo Grant, this year Hjorth Road Elementary welcomed support from outside organizations aimed at promoting and developing literacy skills in youth. In particular, the after-school Book Buddies program from SFU supported the literacy development of emerging readers on a weekly basis.
OUR FOCUS
Each and every day, among the variety of learning experiences presented to our learners, our team of educators focus on thinking, writing, and communicating in all curricular areas. Our aim is to build strong literacy foundations that are fundamental for students' participation in today’s world.
In our classrooms, teachers and Learning Support Teachers work with the curriculum in purposeful and intentional ways. Teachers collaborate together to gain a deeper understanding of where students are in their learning and what support they need to develop to gain greater success.
Targeted support was provided to early primary students with an emphasis on emerging phonemic awareness. While the Fountas & Pinnell levelled literacy program is utilized to support the programming of our emerging-developing readers, we focused on specific resources, materials and teaching strategies to support the decoding skills of our emerging readers.
To highlight and determine overall successes and emerging areas of focus, we monitored the progress of two small cohorts of primary students. Our Student Learning Plan highlights and documents the learning journey of these two cohorts and their developing literacy skills.
Our students’ learning goal includes:
- Developing phonemic awareness skills to identify and manipulate the letter-sound relationship.
With a specific and targeted emphasis on strategy, the LST team focused on using knowledge of language patterns and phonics to decode words with increasing fluency. Key skill development highlighted the following areas:
Rhyming – with emphasis on the Road to Reading program and CVC word family activities
Syllables – with explicit instruction with breaking words in syllables based upon vowels placement in words
Blending - using sound beads to explicit teach the connection between sounds and letters
Segmenting – using sound beads to take the words apart into isolated sounds
Students were provided with an opportunity to use The Road to Reading Program in conjunction with related resources including Reading Rod kits, Words Their Way sorts, flashcards, and memory & letter sound games. Strategies to identify letter-sound, as well as strategies to decode words, were explicitly taught. Within the classroom, the Heggerty resources were utilized and specific decoding and reading strategies were emphasized as core elements of instruction.
OUR NEXT STEPS
Evidence of our students’ learning demonstrates that our literacy focus is positively impacting both cohorts of learners. When surveyed and asked to communicate their students’ progress using the provincial assessment scale, teachers from both cohorts indicated that all students demonstrated growth in relation to our literacy goal:
Developing phonemic awareness skills to identify and manipulate the letter-sound relationship.
Based on teachers' observations, conferences and examples of student work growth was demonstrated in our January to June results. The results showed a decrease in the percentage of students who are emerging (-55%) and an increase in students who are developing (+45%) and students who are proficient (+10%). More descriptive evidence of learning that is specific to this literacy goal is highlighted below.
Developing phonemic awareness skills to identify and manipulate the letter-sound relationship.
Our learners received consistent, targeted instruction focused on phonemic awareness each day within the learner support and classroom environments. Teachers report that the majority of students advanced in their phonemic awareness skills across the continuum of proficiency skill development. Teachers identified targeted instruction as being central to contributing to this growth.
Our ELPATs assessments indicated that 80% of our students are able to recognize syllables with increasing levels of proficiency and 65% of students are able to blend with increasing proficiency.
Moving Forward
At Hjorth Road Elementary, we celebrate the growth of our students and are proud of their progress in learning to read. We are committed to providing our students with learning goals that will further support their literacy development. Based on the evidence of students’ progress in relation to our initial learning goal, our next steps will include:
Reading to comprehend by asking questions, making simple inferences and creating mental images of text.
- Increasing opportunities for students to regularly use reading strategies with adults and peer-readers
Communicating thoughts and ideas with peers and adults related to the topic at hand.
- Providing students with opportunities to engage in oral language development through class discussions & adult connections
Further Steps
At Hjorth Road, we welcome and support learners from diverse cultures with a range of English language abilities. We endeavour to be responsive to the literacy learning requirements of all students at our school.
We will endeavour to foster and instill a love of reading in our students by helping them understand the limitless possibilities reading can provide. Our goal is to have students intrinsically motivated to learn.
We will continue to support and promote the act of reading by actively using best-practice, evidence-based instructional resources within our classroom to support phonemic awareness skill development.
We will increase our collective knowledge as a staff about the reading process and associated instructional strategies.
We will foster a link between the diverse cultures at Hjorth Road and literacy by reading culturally inclusive literature and engaging in discussion to promote interest and understanding of multicultural and Indigenous perspectives.
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.
