Maple Green Elementary 22-23
OUR CONTEXT
OUR LEARNERS
Literacy is a crucial life skill where our learners develop the ability to read, write, speak and think. Teaching literacy to students gives them the ability to communicate clearly and effectively. Being effective communicators allows students to grow successfully and understand the world. Evidence of student growth in this competency is showcased below.
Our learners are developing their language skills through oral stories. Students created imaginative writing based on First Peoples stories where students shared, taught lessons and connected to nature through narrative text.
Story workshop is an approach for early literacy that connects play, art and writing. Students develop their ideas and stories through a variety of hands on materials, such as loose parts.
Learning is embedded in memory and story. (First People’s Principles of Learning)
In this sample, our student creates her story using branches, flowers, and small toys. Her imagination allows her to use a branch to represent a tree, and blue felt to represent water. As she tells her story, she uses dialogue to share what the characters want to say.
“Phonemic awareness is the understanding that spoken words are made up of individual sounds called phonemes. A child who is phonemically aware is able to isolate sounds, manipulate sounds, blend and segment the sounds into spoken and written words” – Heggerty
Our learners are actively participating in the Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum which provides students with consistent and repeat instruction. This transfers to developing a student’s decoding and encoding skills. Below, the students in a Grade 1 class work through a daily Heggerty lesson.
OUR FOCUS
Literacy is a crucial life skill where our learners develop the ability to read, write, speak and think. Teaching literacy to students gives them the ability to communicate clearly and effectively. Being effective communicators allows students to grow successfully and understand the world. Evidence of student growth in this competency is showcased below.
Our students’ learning goals include:
- Decoding, understanding and making meaning of text
- Thinking creatively to generate ideas (for example, creating a STEM plan, creative writing, story workshop, etc.)
These opportunities, supported by teaching explicit strategies and resources, are aimed at increasing the ability to learn to read and to read to learn. In order to highlight successes and to aid in determining areas for growth, we continued to monitor a cohort of grade 1 students in relation to success in meeting the above goals developed by staff. This grows out of the information collected in the previous year from the then Kindergarten aged students. Our learners have many reading opportunities to explore written and visual texts, including but not limited to, read alouds, buddy reading, Daily 5 reading (read to self, read to someone, listen to reading), novel study, literature circles, guided reading, home reading, etc.
Our learners wrote First People’s stories and engaged in communication practices to share their creative writing with their peers. After we shared our written stories, we orally retold our stories from memory so students could experience oral story telling practices.
Literacy centres offer meaningful, hands-on learning experiences where students can work independently or collaboratively to meet literacy goals.
This involves exploration and experiences connected to creative thinking, critical thinking, communication, and personal and social awareness
Students continue to work on generating ideas, or writing on topics of interest to support their writing goals. By taking the time to to brainstorm ideas and highlighting the main points of each idea, students are beginning to take their ideas and write them out into complete sentences. Students may use graphic organizers, pair share, and use hands-on activities to think through what they want to write out.
OUR NEXT STEPS
Evidence of our students' learning demonstrates our literacy focus is positively impacting our learners. When surveyed and asked to communicate student's progress using the provincial assessment scale, the teachers indicated that students demonstrated growth in relation to our literacy goals:
Our students’ learning goals include:
- Decoding, understanding and making meaning of text
- Thinking creatively to generate ideas (for example, creating a STEM plan, creative writing, story workshop, etc.)
Data on literacy goals for January 2023 below is based on two Grade 1 classes (46 students total).
The first proficiency scale below highlights the proficiency scale for Grade 1 students in reading with a focus on decoding, understanding, and making meaning from the text. Students have worked through reading a given text by using various reading strategies and working through comprehension questions.
The second proficiency scale below highlights the literacy goal focused on writing. Students have been encouraged to think creatively to generate a piece of writing. Their writing demonstrates their understanding of the concepts of writing and relate it back to their topic of focus. Students continue to work on their ability to think of an idea to write on, and then begin to work through the writing process.
Our data in reading shows steady student improvement, but our writing data appears to flatten. Upon further examination, it became clear that the data collected by cohort did not capture the individual student changes within the cohorts over the school year. Data will need to be collected by cohort, but the cohort members need to be the same at both points in time when it is collected. Additionally, further examination needs to occur to match assessment tools to the data being gathered and to build consistent methods of assessment of student learning.
Moving forward, there will continue to be a focus in the primary grades on phonemic awareness skills which will allow students to build on the foundational literacy skills that continue to be crucial in a student's overall learning across all curricular areas. Incorporating phonemic awareness lessons and targeted literacy lessons within the classroom will support all learners. Activities such as literacy centres, story workshop, and hands-on lessons will allow students to explore their imagination and creativity. As a school, we are committed to expand the cohorts to include intermediate classes to gather information to better support learners across the grades. Intermediate teachers will explore opportunities to strengthen reading instruction for their readers. Continuing to provide many opportunities for Maple Green students from K-7 to read and write can allow students to grow in their abilities and to gain confidence in their overall literacy competencies.
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.
