Kindergarten Literacy Assessment Tools

Delta just rolled out a suite of tools for Kindergarten teachers for Literacy Assessment and Evaluation. The suite was designed by a team of K, Grade 1 and Learning support teachers. We aimed to provide useful tools to teachers to enable us to share common language and expectations for K that both reflect the new curriculum and dovetail into our Grade 1 literacy benchmarks.

Underlying this work is a Print Acquisition Continua that the team created to capture the developmental stages of children discovering how print works and using it for their purposes.  One of the main reasons we decided to create a new continua was to be able to describe where kids are at on the journey based on what they CAN do.

We know how important it is for us as early learning teachers to help kids crack the literacy code. We also know that this is one small piece of the broader literacy competencies that we want for out kids. Teachers asked for and we gave them a set of term by term benchmarks that includes both the Print Acquisition skills and the broader literacy understandings, competencies and knowledge captured in the new curriculum.

To go along with these common standards and continua, we've provided 6 optional assessment tools for teachers to use or adapt for their purposes. The 6 optional assessment tools are focussed on the Print Acquisition continua. We think this is information teachers need to have about all their students. How teachers are able to get that information can change from class to class and from student to student.

For each area of Oral Language, Reading and Writing, teachers have access to an Observation Frame, a Class Profile, and an Interview Protocol. Each interview protocol includes both metacognition/self-concept questions, feedback and goal setting.

The entire collection of tools and resources can be found in the google folder below:

Delta Kindergarten Literacy Assessment Google Folder

We view all these documents as works in progress and are actively inviting feedback from our teachers as they implement this year. Other thoughts and feedback are also welcome :)

Story Workshop

May 23, 2014
Story Workshop
Richmond School District sent a group of teachers, administrators, and StrongStart facilitators to visit Opal School in Portland, Oregon to participate in the two day symposium called, "Reading the World".
This session gave participants time to observe in classrooms while story Workshop was taking place.  Everyone who participated in the sessions came away with new insights about story workshop and many of these could be put into practice.  Teachers were inspired by the collaborative nature of the classrooms and the mutual respect by both teachers and students.  Opal school has a very comprehensive blog and website that can be easily viewed.

Richmond Report

May 23, 2014
Changing Results for Young Readers
Richmond School District has continued to support Changing Results for Young Readers.  The four schools involved recently completed their case studies and submitted them.  The last meeting confirmed that positive relationships with students and responsive practice has made a difference for our students.
The team attended the April Conference and enjoyed hearing Pat Johnson, author of Catching Readers Before They Fall.

Teaching Oral Language in Kindergarten

Teachers in Delta are inquiring into the ways they support language acquisition. The inquiries are collaborations between Kindergarten classroom teachers, and in many cases the ELL specialist teachers who support their students. The project also includes French Immersion teachers.

The purpose of the inquiry is to deepen our capacity to provide responsive in-class support to all of our language learners in Kindergarten. We have used district funds to release teachers to come together with their school teams to:

       1. Establish shared understandings between Early Childhood and Second Language specialists;
       2. Co-plan how they will collaborate to support language learning and;
       3. Share their school based inquiries with other teachers.

We are using a blog to both share information and document the professional learning of the participating school groups. Our materials and process can be viewed at the following link

Teaching the Acquisition of Language in Kindergarten Blog