Port Kells Elementary 24-25

In the past, our school team have been focused on developing school-wide universal supports for Social Emotional Learning (SEL). That work continues in each class as part of the everyday routines.  Looking forward,  we  know that an area that we must continue to improve upon is reading.  We know this, based upon information provided by FSA results, year-end assessments and day-to-day observation .  We are also keenly aware of the fact that early intervention is a foundational piece in building student success in later grades. 

We are fortunate to have teachers in the primary grades who recognize the importance of phonemic awareness and phonics instruction in developing good readers. Both  the Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum  and UFLI Foundations are used extensively in the primary grades at our school.  Heggerty is used in the kindergarten and grade 1 class. These materials focus primarily on developing students' ability to hear and manipulate sounds. UFLI Foundations, which is being used in the Grade 2/3 class,  builds on those skills by teaching students how to use those sounds when they see letters and print.

We understand that developing student knowledge of phonemes and providing explicit phonics instruction are foundational to being an effective reader. 

  From the BC School Language Arts Curriculum:

K/1 Learning Standards

-Phonemic awareness is a specific aspect of a learner's phonological awareness: a child's ability to segment broken words into phonemes and to blend phonemes into words indicates a developing  phonemic awareness.

-Phonological awareness involves the abilities to hear and create rhyming words, segment the flow of speech into separeate words, and hear syllables as 'chunks' in spoken words.

Gr. 2/3 Learning Standards

-Using knowledge of language patterns and phonics to decode words; identifying familiar and 'sight' words; monitoring (asking: Does it look right? Sound right? Make sense?)

-Recognizing and identifying word patterns/families

Given the importance of these areas,  we wondered if daily use of these materials in primary grades would have a significant effect on year-end reading scores.  Each of our student's reading  is assessed at both the beginning and end of the school year using the  Fountas and Pinnel reading assessment. The Fountas and Pinnel materials also come with a Reading Level Evaluation Chart that indicates a range of achievement levels for each grade at the beginning, middle and end of the school year. We compared the year-end student reading assessments from June of 2024 with June of 2025 to look at growth over a twelve month period.   We were curious to see if year-end reading levels would surpass expected results indicated in the Fountas and Pinell Reading Level Evaluation Chart.  

Our Learning Cohort:

Two classrooms. One a K/1 with 21 students and a Grade 2/3 with 19 students. These 40 students had 20-30 minutes per day using the Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum (K/1) or the UFLI Foundations (Grade 2/3) over the duration of the school year.  Our test cohort was significantly smaller than that number for a variety of reasons:

-we did not assess the kindergarten students using Fountas and Pinell at the end of the school year.

-we did not have 'baseline' data for a number of the students.

-some students moved part way through the school year.

-other students were away during year-end assessments. 

As a result of these factors, our cohort was only comprised of 12 students.  

June 2024  

In June 2024, 67% of the cohort were not meeting the expectations outlined in the Reading Level Evaluation Chart.  Only 16% were approaching expectations and another 16% were meeting the expectations.  

By June 2025, there were significant changes in these students:

 The 'Not Yet Meeting' category had decreased from 67% to 25%.  Approaching category remained steady at approximately 15%.  The meeting category increased from 16% to 25%.  In June 2024, none of our subjects exceeded the expectation, by June 2025, 33% of our subjects were exceeding the expectation.

Student voice:  

The students were excited to demonstrate their skills.  A number of questions were asked of them:

Tell me about a time when you used sounds to figure out a word while reading.

How do you feel when you can hear all the sounds in a word?

Show me how you put sounds together to read a new word.

"When I need to know a word,  I look at the letters and I put the sounds together."

"I know that I am right when I put all the sounds together and I get a word!"

 "I can make changes to words to make new words with new sounds."

 We know that teaching phonics and developing phonological awareness are only part of the puzzle.  Reading is a complex process that 'marries' comprehension skills as well as word recognition skills together.  However, given that  phonics and phonological awareness work comprise a significant portion of literacy instruction in these two classes, we believe that working with resources such as the Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum and UFLI Foundations have had a significant effect on reading levels in Grades K-3 at Port Kells Elementary.

Reading Goals:

• Reading Fluently at Grade level (K-7)
• Engage actively as listeners, viewers, and readers, as appropriate, to develop understanding of self, identity and community (K-3)
• Access information and ideas from a variety of sources and from prior knowledge to build understanding

Some things that we will continue to do to promote literacy and increase reading fluency and comprehension:

-Celebrate reading and writing in our classrooms

-Provide resources and Professional Development opportunities to support best practices in literacy instruction

-Use data obtained from literacy assessments to inform how we best utilize our resources such as LST time and Learning Resource Budget.

-Focus on providing early intervention.

-Share strategies for supporting literacy with our parent community

-Provide engaging digital resources to promote reading.