A focus on strong literacy development is at the heart of what we do at William F. Davidson. The ability to read and communicate effectively is key to our students’ success as they move through their schooling and into their adult lives. They learn these skills in a way that lets our learners communicate effectively and think critically about our world and their lives.
Embedding the Core Competencies into the learning plans and activities has been embraced by all staff. There is collaboration between teachers to ensure continuity across grades and classrooms. Communication is an all-encompassing focus in the school: classrooms, learning supports, integration planning and implementation. We are passionate about discovering and developing each student’s talents and interests. Students take the core competencies and become skillful in collaborating, problem solving, sharing ideas, and expressing their individuality.
Evidence of our learners many gifts, attributes and competencies are highlighted below.
Working together in a group setting at the carpet or at tables, students participate in various programs designed to improve phonological awareness and gain confidence in manipulating language. Students also engage in word work, read aloud stories, choral reading, shared poems, and daily modelling of a love of stories and books to engage students in literacy and help them gain the confidence to read and explore books. Our learners are encouraged to sound out words on their own, use invented spelling and draw on the phonics lessons taught when working on their own writing.
Phonemic awareness is the key to reading.
Through drama, students are exploring the love of language, stories, and reading. Reader’s Theatre provides an example of a structure used to inspire young learners to comprehend deeply and bring own voice to texts in order to bring them alive.
Through literacy experiences, our learners read and write by exploring and creating different types of texts. Learners develop skill sets to help them connect to reading and writing and their personal experiences and knowledge by visualizing, connecting, inferring, questioning, and transforming their thinking and understanding.
"When I am reading, I can share see pictures in my brain to help me understand what I am reading. Pictures help me understand the story." - Nancy
Students worked on the question "Who am I?" and created a "Book Creator" project to further explore their identity and understanding of self.
Everyday students engage in cooperative projects, imaginative play and outdoor activities that employ communication, connection, and teamwork. In our primary classrooms, students develop fundamental problem-solving skills, learn how to collaborate, and build friendships using imaginative play during Center Time.
Our students are developing perseverance, and resiliency . They are learning to take pride in engaging in the learning process and reflecting on the growth they have made on their learning journey. In our classrooms, learners are sharing their ideas about how they solve problems during math talks, seeking support from peers during small group work, and learning to ask for teacher support so that they feel confident to take on challenges independently.
Our learners have wonderful ideas, passions, and values. Students’ voices are harnessed through raising chicks and building a community garden. Students were responsible for building structures for the chicks, providing heating and a safe environment. They purposefully wrote for donations, built the garden beds, and were responsible for planting and care of the plants.
Our learners find meaning from the texts they read based on their own experiences. Students develop through their shared thinking a deeper understanding of text during book club meetings. Students respond to others in their group and every student adds to each other’s ideas using evidence from the text or personal experiences to build a richer understanding. Through these book clubs, students are deepening their understanding and working on the core competency of communication.
Our learners ignite their imaginations and collaborate with peers to develop their ideas through hands-on learning experiences.Students find inspiration to write and work together when they are provided authentic, hands-on learning opportunities. Story Workshop is being used to help students to develop their ideas and explore language through play. Working and manipulating real materials makes the writing process tactile. These hands-on processes ignite student’s innate desire for learning and bring learners together through shared experience.
Our learners engage in a variety of learning experiences where they are communicating, reading, writing, and engaging in social emotional learning each day. Our educators develop curricular and social experiences designed to engage, empower, and support learners in each of these domains.
Literacy development is a focus because we understand the ability to read, write, speak and think in a way that lets our students communicate effectively is key to our student’s success as they move through their learning journey. This will be done through the three learning goals listed below:
1. Supporting the Big Ideas 'Listening and speaking builds our understanding and helps us learn' and "Playing with language helps us to discover how language works" early Primary teachers will continue the daily practice of Heggerty Phonics. This interactive whole group activity has been embedded into the daily routine of all primary students at our school.
2. Engage students in a balanced literacy approach to increase the number of students that can comprehend and connect. Our learners will continue to participate in daily literacy activities to foster a sense of community that empowers them. Primary classes at our school are taught to honour where they are in their literacy learning journey. Teachers use the Daily 5 structures to build students comprehension skills, improve accuracy, fluency and expand their vocabulary.
3. Story workshop provides a safe, secure, interactive and creative environment for all our young learners to develop literacy and social skills. It is carried out once or twice a week in our early primary classrooms. It provides students with an authentic experience to imagine, play, write, edit, revise, publish and share their stories. Story workshop also provides opportunities for teachers to model, focus on vocabulary, literacy elements, oral language, writing skills and focus on a variety of different literacy skills through mini lessons to support our balanced literacy program.
All teachers, across all grades, provide students with learning opportunities aimed at increasing the literacy success rates of our learners.
Reading is an all-encompassing part of daily life. Students read in every aspect of their learning. They read for information and entertainment. As readers, students need to have strategies to decode, interpret, analyse, make connections, and create deep understanding.
Writing and communicating are vital parts of communication. Our learners engage in writing to convey information, tell stories, communicate digitally, and express themselves. They also communicate through a variety of other types of text including oral stories and visuals such as posters, memes, and photography.
Every day, our learners are presented with opportunities to practice and demonstrate their Social and Emotional Learning skills and capabilities. Our team of educators provide our learners with these essential skills to set them up for success in today's rapidly changing world. To identify students' overall strengths' overall strengths and areas of growth. We tracked Responsible-Decision Making in three cohorts of learners across subject areas and grade levels. These cohorts include a diverse range of learners that are representative of our school's population.
The SEL competencies we focused on in relation to "responsible decision making" include:
Below are examples of our students' classroom experience as they relate to responsible decision making.
Evidence of our students' learning demonstrates that our literacy focus is positively impacting both cohorts of learners. When assessed, 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 goals highlighted below.
When surveyed and asked using the proficiency scale, we noticed that there was growth demonstrated in our September to May assessments in both primary and intermediate levels. Evidence of our learners growth in reading skills are highlighted below.
Our learners have great capacity and increasing resiliency. Through the focus of literacy, our learners demonstrated growth in perseverance, relationship skills, and social awareness. Growth in the area of Social Emotional learning helps our learners grow in the areas of reading, writing, and communicating.
Below are examples of ways teachers foster Social Emotional Learning in their classrooms, and how they will continue to keep SEL at the core of their instruction.
1. Self Awareness
2. Social Awareness
3. Responsible Decision Making
4. Relationship Skills
5. Self Management
When surveyed and asked how students demonstrate resiliency using their Social and Emotional skills, we noticed the following strategies below were identified.
At William F. Davidson, we are proud of the incredible progress our students have made in literacy and their social emotional development of self regulation and resiliency.
Based on evidence of students' progress in relation to our learning goals, our next steps will include:
We will continue embracing the science of reading and actively using instructional strategies to decode letters and words. We will continue to intentionally teach strategies to improve of reading and writing skills.
We will go deeper by reading a variety of genres to help students learn text structures and language that students can confidently transfer to their own literacy skills and social and emotional development.
We will explore the connections between reading and writing. When students read, they should feel that understanding the text is their most important task, and when they write, they will know their goal is to create a connection with the readers of their text.