Surrey Traditional 24-25

In September of 2024-2025 school year, we continued our focus on Literacy, with a key focus in reading skills.  Literacy skills are fundamental to how we communicate and express our ideas, and become successful collaborators and contributing members of society. At Surrey Traditional Elementary, our goal is to enable our students to comprehend and connect with a variety of texts (print and digital) in order to communicate effectively with others. We strive to provide early learning experiences that allow our students to play with and develop a love for language, coupled with daily reading experiences. As many of our students are English Language Learners (ELL), we understand the importance of building background knowledge through these experiences and involving our families in developing their understanding and confidence with home-based literacy practices.  We believe this work supports the district’s goals for student success in reading across all grade levels and aims to address both early intervention and targeted skill development for learners at all grade levels.

We focused on the following curricular competencies:

• Read fluently at grade level 
• Use sources of information and prior knowledge to make meaning 
• Use developmentally appropriate reading, listening, and viewing strategies to make meaning 

The specific Learning Goals we will focus on are:

• Developing phonemic and phonological awareness skills
  • Phonemic awareness, a crucial component of phonological awareness, involves the ability to hear and recognize individual sounds within words. This skill is a pivotal factor in early reading success and can profoundly impact a child's future literacy development. We firmly believe that the development of phonemic awareness skills during a child's formative years of schooling is directly correlated with reading fluency, decoding ability, and the comprehension of written text.
• Building reading fluency skills across all grade levels
  • Students at the primary levels will read grade-level texts with fluency, accuracy and with expression
  • Students at the intermediate level  will strengthen reading accuracy, vocabulary, and comprehension strategies to support learning across all areas of the curriculum.
• Cultivating reading comprehension skills that enable students to make sense of texts and employ a variety of reading strategies, allowing them to interact with and derive meaning from what they are reading
• Students will use a variety of comprehension strategies before, during, and after reading, listening, or viewing to guide inquiry and deepen understanding of texts.

Strategies:

• Targeted Learning support from our LST team for our most at-risk learners as well as our struggling learners/readers.
• Direct in-class support for our struggling learners
• Using a structured phonics program to build decoding and fluency at our primary grades.
• Direct instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.
• Direct teaching and focus on increasing vocabulary, spelling, and comprehension at our intermediate grades.

What we hope to gain or see:

While we understand that students will not jump from an  'emerging' level  to a 'proficient' level immediately, our hope is to see students gradually improve in the key areas above in a positive progression.

By focusing on foundational reading skills across all grade levels, specifically our primary grades,  we hope our Students will:

• Move from basic decoding toward fluent, expressive reading
• Apply strategies independently to comprehend and engage with texts
• Show increased confidence, independence, and stamina in reading tasks
• Provide students with the literacy skills needed for success across all curriculum areas
• Reduce the number of students requiring intensive or targeted intervention support (LST support)
• promote a love and enjoyment of reading*

*One thing we discovered this year in talking to our students and our families was that students did not like or enjoy reading for a variety of reasons:

• its hard; I'm not good at it
• It's boring; I'd rather play video games or play outside
• It takes to long
• I don't know what to read
• I don't have time

This discovery has also made us shift our focus for next school year on increasing student enjoyment in reading, to further increase our reading levels.  

Throughout the year at Surrey Traditional School, we gathered data in the form of observations, dialogue and feedback, daily work, and school-wide assessments.  Preliminary data that was collected and used were ELPATS, FSA results (grade 4 & 7), school-wide reading assessments and ELA proficiency scale from the previous school year.  

We have found that focusing on our literacy goal and with direct teaching we have seen improvements across the grades. Our data did show us that our early primary students demonstrated greater improvement and growth with more students reaching proficient or developing grade-level expectations by the end of the school year, while our intermediate students seemed to remain consistent with minimal growth by year-end.  Students receiving targeted reading support showed steady progress in their literacy skills. While not all students moved up to the next  level, they  did demonstrated growth  at their own ability in the areas of letter recognition and sound, site word recognition, decoding, fluency and confidence.  Our data this year was to showcase growth across all grade levels for each student - not whether they had reached grade-level benchmark expectations.  From our data we were able to see the positive impact that daily direct teaching of phonemic awareness and reading strategies had on our primary and targeted learners.  While our intermediate students were able to decode texts and materials, they did struggle with comprehension and inferring what was read, as well as expanding their understanding.  We also discovered that many of our students expressed to us that they did not like to read, and this had an impact on their overall literacy achievements. We found that our primary students showed more engagement and joy in reading and story time compared to our intermediate students, and that they also had a higher number participate in the daily home reading programs.   This has made us look at this further as a focus for next school year to increase the joy and love of books and reading.  Reading is the foundation for life-long learning and we want students to leave our school with these skills.

Moving Forward:

Based on our observations, conversations, and results, we will stay the course, Literacy is still the main area of need in our school, and it does take time to build and develop the skills necessary in our students.  We will continue to prioritize reading development across all grade levels, with a  focus on building fluency, accuracy and comprehension through evidence-informed practices.

As a school team we will:

• Meet regularly to discuss student progress and assess students and place our most vulnerable or struggling learners based on ability groups for intensive support (These groupings will be fluid in nature)
• Continue to review the data from our ELPATA, FSA's and our class and school-wide reading assessments to adjust our teaching, but to also determine small group interventions.
• Continue to use Fountas and Pinnell as our reading assessment and intensive small group support
• Continue to focus on phonemic awareness with a consistent primary used resource
• Survey the students in the fall, and then do a follow-up in the spring to document and explore our results, on student engagement and enjoyment level of reading.

  • We will ask the following questions:

    • Do you like reading?

    • Why or why not?

    • What types of books do you like to read?

    • Do you read at home?

• Look at implementing a school-wide home-reading or reading challenge program (to promote enjoyment and engagement)
• work together to implement structured literacy approaches
• Connect with district literacy teams and supports

  • host "Lunch and Learn" and Professional Development" on reading strategies, Reading assessment practices, etc. 

Our students will continue to:

• Build their enjoyment and engagement in reading
• receive direct in-class support in literacy instruction
• to develop phonemic and phonological awareness skills
• Build reading fluency skills across the grade levels
• Develop reading comprehension skills that enable students to make sense of text, and employ a variety of strategies that will allow them to nteract with text in order to make sense of what they are reading
• receive intensive or targeted support by our Learner Support Team
• To learn about who they are as literacy learners and to recognize their stretches and strengths in their learning
• To reflect on their learning through self-reflection on the curricular- and core-competencies

While we recognize and celebrate the success of all our learners, we remain focused on how to continue to support our learners who are still struggling or not increasing their literacy skills.  Our ongoing goal is to support growth, ensuring all of our students, regardless of where they are at or are starting from , develop a joy (or love) of reading; develop strong literacy skills that will support them throughout their learning journey.  

We will continue to use the following guidelines/criteria to provide feedback for our students in both the Core and Curricular Competencies and to show students how each are connected. We will continue to emphasize the importance and value of student self-assessment and self-reflections for one’s own growth.

We will continue to focus on First Peoples Principals of Learning.  With a key focus on:

Learning takes patience and time