Surrey Traditional Elementary 23-24

In September of the 2022-2023 academic year, Surrey Traditional Elementary embarked on a strategic transition, shifting our primary focus from Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) to Literacy. While we recognize the immense value of SEL, we felt that our school community had effectively integrated and "lived" these principles, and it was an opportune time to place a targeted emphasis on literacy development.

Literacy skills form the foundational bedrock upon which children not only acquire the lifelong abilities of reading and writing but also develop essential life skills that enable them to make sense of their world, build critical thinking capacities, and effectively communicate with others. Our goal is to highlight the vital role that the early years play in fostering a love of language and storytelling, a passion that should continue through a child's primary and intermediate years of schooling.

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
• Building reading fluency skills across all grade levels

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

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.

Skills involved in phonemic awareness include rhyming, blending, and syllabication. Our work with our first cohort of students has focused on developing these skills in a fun and play-based environment, allowing for repeated exposure and practice, which is particularly beneficial for our more vulnerable learners. Additionally, we have focused on providing our Kindergarten teachers with the support and resources necessary to equip parents with literacy strategies that can be implemented at home, allowing for authentic and continuous learning opportunities for their children. Through this strategic emphasis on literacy development, we aim to empower our students with the essential skills and passion for language that will serve as the foundation for their academic success and personal growth.

Throughout 2022-2023, we gathered data so we can more effectively begin building a more robust plan for our learners in 2023-2024.

Primary data sources for this plan included:

• ELPATS assessment results
• Fountas & Pinnell Reading Assessment results (school-wide)
• Language Arts proficiency scale data from 2022-2023

With some initial data, we can begin a pre-post study involving our aforementioned goals:

• Developing phonemic and phonological awareness skills
• Building reading fluency skills across the grade levels
• Developing reading comprehension skills that enable students to make sense of text, and employ a variety of reading strategies that will allow them to interact with text in order to make sense of what they are reading

In looking at reading fluency, we will still need to gain information with running records and miscue analysis for our early learners who formed our cohorts (Kindergarten and Grade 1). They will be in Grade 1 and 2 in 2023-2024.

Some initial interventions at our school include honouring what we are doing well in our classrooms in early literacy. We will then look at a three-pronged approach to supporting teachers to support our learners:

1. Continuing our focus on phonemic awareness with consistent primary-wide use of Heggerty
2. Supporting professional development for our teachers in this area
3. Collaborating, sharing, and dissecting our assessment information to draw conclusions and revisit the plan.

Success Criteria (for next year):

• Grade 1 and 2 students will be proficient with phonemic awareness skills as evidenced by the new Primary ELPATS scores, and;
• Grade 1 and 2 students will read with proficiency at grade level (fluency and comprehension).

Seventy-six percent of our Grade One students demonstrated extending or proficient reading proficiency on the Spring reading assessments.  Overall, with 89% of our students on-track, our Grade ones are performing well.  

Seventy-six percent of our Grade Two students also demonstrated extending or proficient reading proficiency on the Spring reading assessments.  Combined, our Grade twos are on-track with 88%.

Throughout the coming year, we will continue to focus on phonemic awareness instruction for our students throughout the primary grades, and ongoing professional development for our staff in effective reading instruction and the use of universal, as well as targeted supports to support all of our learners.