Working to improve students’ literacy skills, specifically reading.

Being able to read is central to everything that we do in life.  As a dual track school, language is extremely important.   Literacy was identified as our focus based on FSA (Foundation Skills Assessments – Grades 4 and 7) and through scanning undertaken by staff of the students in our classrooms. 

As this is year one of this focus, we are in the process of gathering information that will enable us to targeting those students who have been identified as Emerging readers, as well as those who have been flagged by classroom teachers as having lagging skills. 

In addition, we want to know about all the learners in our school.  This information will help us build upon not only their attitudes toward reading – promoting reading as something that can be fun and bring people together, but will help us find ways to help broaden our students knowledge of and exposure to literature.

Using our RFRA (Richmond Foundational Reading Assessment) which breaks down reading skills into a more comprehensive list compared to the FSA, we will be able to identify the specific skills our students need support with.

To the second part of our goal, we are also looking at ways to gather information about what students like to read, what their exposure has been with varying reading genres and providing them with opportunities to get together to share their feelings and reading experience with each other.

We expect to see ALL of our students, by the end of Grade 7, have “On Track” assessments in Literacy. 

We also hope to see our students attitudes toward reading change and our teachers using more innovative ways to promote reading in the classroom.

We will see a decrease in the number of students identified as Emerging through our Grade 7 FSA data.  We might also see a decrease in the number of students identified as Emerging through our Grade 4 FSA data, showing that we are also making a difference in the primary grades as well.

As for the second goal, this one is measured more informally.  Possible sources of data are: observations (who is participating in various reading activities eg. Reader’s Choice, Dixon Book Club), student library book borrowing habits (eg. are students taking out more non-fiction titles, etc.).

Alignment Statement

Success for all learners: Improve literacy and numeracy outcomes for all learners to support success in all areas of the kindergarten to Grade 12 curriculum.