School Name: Beach Grove
School District: SD#37 Delta
Inquiry Team Members: Josie Zahn: jzahn@deltaschools.ca, Angela Vaughan: avaughan@deltaschools.ca, Mark Douangchanh: mdouangchanh@deltaschools.ca
Inquiry Team Contact Email: jzahn@deltaschools.ca
Type of Inquiry: NOIIE
Grade Levels: Primary (K-3), Intermediate (4-7)
Curricular Area(s): Language Arts – Reading
Focus Addressed: Differentiated instruction, Formative assessment, Inclusion and inclusive instructional strategies, Inquiry-based learning
In one sentence, what was your focus for the year? Reading: What does reading instruction look like from K-7?
Scanning: First we collected information from all staff at our first Pro-d in September. Staff was asked: What’s going on for our learners? How do we know? Why does it matter? Gaps in learning emerged as a concern from many staff members. Due to Covid, students have been away from school for 6 months and instruction varied during this time. Now they are back at school, both students and staff are experiencing long absences (i.e. a week at a time) due to illness or waiting for test results.
Focus: After deciding to focus on reading, classroom teachers were given release time to think about the needs of the readers in their class. Many read with students, did a reading benchmark assessment, or did a phonological assessment with students. Teachers filled in the “Getting to know your reader-planning tool”. Students were given a Reading Interest Survey to collect their feedback on how they feel about reading. This process brought awareness that we needed to look more explicitly at “What does reading instruction look like from K-7?”. We were hoping to get more awareness of the needs of our students from K-7 in regards to reading and help them develop stronger reading skills.
Hunch: A lot of teachers were using different approaches to reading as well as different resources. We were wondering if we all tried a common resource if it might bring some consistency and continuity for the students, and help teachers to “be on the same page” around reading when we discuss it together.
New Professional Learning: We will be looking at Delta School District’s Literacy Continua and Standards (K-7) to learn more about reading instruction at all the elementary grade levels. (https://deltalearns.ca/elementaryliteracy/assessment-materials/). We will also be exploring what resources and assessment tools are available to us at every grade level from K-7. We are going to look at the Next Steps Guided Reading Assessment for Gr. 3-6 (http://teacher.scholastic.com/education/next-step-guided-reading-assessment/index.html) as we already use the primary kit. We will be looking at Rime Magic (https://education.scholastic.ca/productlist/RIME-MAGIC) for use in our classrooms to see if daily instruction in decoding will have an impact on our students reading. We will be looking at PAST (Phonological Awareness Screening Test). These are all new resources (or new to our staff at those levels) and will take some time to explore together.
Taking Action: One of our Learning Support Teachers was able to go into classes and demonstrate how to use the Rime Magic kit with the whole class. This is something that had been done in smaller groups and it was nice to see how it worked with a whole class. It also helped teachers become more confident in using this resource on their own.
Checking: Differences made were that some teachers felt more comfortable using the new Rime Magic kit, but it was still not enough time. Our hope is to continue this team teaching approach to model the resource next year, especially since some teachers felt like they needed more modelling, as well as that we will have some new teachers on staff next year. We were really satisfied with the high engagement of the students using the Rime Magic kit, which tells us that this will be a successful resource to continue using with our primary students. The children were benchmarked through the year in terms of their reading level, and there were increases in all students over the year.
Reflections/Advice: Advice would be to start small. We started with a lot of resources and a bigger focus, and narrowed it down to specifically looking at the Rime Magic resource. We were able to experience success with this resource and change in that we will continue to use it next year and expand our comfort level with it.