The CARE Project (Collaborating About Reading Engagement) launched this September on the Sunshine Coast.  A team from each elementary school attends the sessions, including Primary, Intermediate, Support Services, Aboriginal Education, and Reading Support Teachers and Principals. Monthly meetings are held to develop a network for sharing values, mindsets and strategies of collaborative reading supports across our district. Primary and Intermediate teachers in the project each receive 2 half days of release time per month for collaboration time to support reading practice.

Through the CARE Project, educators in the district have been able to participate in some wonderful professional development to support the student literacy. 

Faye Brownlie led a session on reading assessments in October, and each time school teams participate in the CARE project we provide time for teams to plan for reading assessments.

Teachers had a chance to examine the factors that influence reading enjoyment and to purchase outstanding, new books in the November CARE Project meeting and in an after school ‘Supporting Readers’ session with Vancouver Kidsbooks.

Infusing learning with indigenous literature and knowledge was the focus of the January CARE Project session.  Our district Aboriginal Support Team described the collaborative work they do to support teachers and students.  Terri Mack from Strong Nations Publishing then highlighted stories and strategies that build community and teach culture.  The district supported elementary school teams in purchasing literature to support indigenous ways of learning in the classroom.

Many of the teachers and StrongStart facilitators in the district were able to learn about ‘Multiple Paths to Literacy’ during a full day with Miriam Trehearne on the district professional development day in February.  In March, an amazing session titled ‘We Are All Connected’ with Adrienne Gear was offered. Books from both authors have been purchased for staff at all schools. 

If you have questions, feel free to contact me (Kirsten Deasey) at kdeasey@sd46.bc.ca or 604-741-5787.

On the Sunshine Coast we have developed a strategy called ‘Coast READS’ – modeled after the CBC radio initiative ‘Canada Reads’.  We work with our community partners (including Welcoming Communities, Early Years Centres and Literacy Council) and our school staff, including teachers and librarians to choose books ranging from the early years all the way up to adult fiction.  We have these books in all of our school and public libraries and hold events where we will debate these book selections.  The purpose is to celebrate the JOY of reading, school- community connections, intergenerational literacy, and to create community-wide conversations! Take a look at this year’s book selections:

POPEI's Redesigned Curriculum Support

The Redesigned Curriculum is a popular topic for POPEI workshops so far this fall.

We have already completed several workshops on this topic, with many more planned throughout the school year.

We will also be hosting two full day Regional Workshops on the topic of the Redesigned Curriculum and K-3 Literacy. We will be in Burnaby on February 17, and then in Abbotsford on February 24. These will be open to all educators. Stay turned for registration information that can be shared with anyone who may be interested.

Last year, we launched a section of our website dedicated to the redesigned curriculum, where we shared "user & printer" friendly versions of the K-3 ELA curriculum, and the Core Competencies.


This Spring, POPEI created a Literacy Planning Guide that we have been excited to share with BC educators. It is now available in Word format, (linked on the website) for those who want to customize the guide for other subject areas or grades. 

Feedback from educators has been extremely positive so far.

It has been very rewarding to support BC educators during the first few weeks of implementation, and we look forward to continuing to do so, throughout 2016-2017.

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 :)

Language Arts Curricular Competencies

To help folks understand the new English Language Arts Curriculum and facilitate cross grade understanding here is an excel doc with K-7 curricular competencies arranged to show how they progress from grade to grade
K-7 English Language Arts Curricular Competencies

Comparing BC's Transformed Curriculum (Language Arts)

At our September in-service Delta Kindergarten and K/1 teachers spent some time working with the new language arts transformed curriculum drafts that were released in August.  To help teachers process the new curriculum we worked with one pagers for both the new and current curricula (English and French Immersion). We spent the bulk of our time comparing the big ideas which is why the first page of each document just has the big ideas (goals from IRP docs) listed. The second page of each document has all the detail including the pop-ups/elaborations added from the newest drafts so that teachers can see all the detail in one place and easily cross reference different pieces. Not all of the transformed English Language Arts curriculum fit on the one page so the overflow definitions are included in a glossary page.

Transformed Kindergarten English Language Arts (08/2015)

Transformed English Language Arts Glossary (08/2015)

Kindergarten English Language Arts (2006)

Transformed French Immersion Kindergarten Language Arts (08/2015)

French Immersion Kindergarten Language Arts (1997)

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.

Vancouver School District continues to focus on Early Intervention in addressing the literacy needs of at risks students in Kindergarten to Grade 3. Presently, about half of the schools in the district (49 schools) are implementing the Early Intervention Model where Reading Recovery (one to one, 5 times a week) addresses the most at risk learners, small group reading/writing groups (4 students 4 times a week) focus in on tier two students and a comprehensive literacy program in classrooms for all learners. The district continues to support the ongoing professional development of over 65 Reading Recovery teachers to support this EI Model. The District EI Team has concentrated on facilitating and building collaboration and professional learning among members of school teams.

"Catching Readers Before They Fall" Conference with Pat Johnson and Katie Keier is well subscribed for Friday, January 31st at the Croatian Cultural Centre. We look forward to a full day of literacy learning through addressing whole class practice and differentiated reading instruction for diverse learners in the classrooms.

Pat Johnson is returning to continue the conversation with the Changing Results for Young Readers (CR4YRs) Network session on Thursday, April 10th and Friday, April 11th at the Sheraton Airport Hilton Hotel in Richmond. The presentation on April 10th will be for CR4YR's district teams.  Registration is open to all for the Friday, April 11th through  http://catchingreaders.ourconference.ca/

Changing Results for Young Readers (CR4YRs)  - We have two cohorts from Kindergarten to Grade Three and one cohort focusing on Grade Eight to Twelve (Changing Results for Adolescents). Teachers are looking closely at many complex learners who are struggling in reading, learning, engagement and motivation in our schools. Many teachers are examining how to meet students' needs with through differentiated instruction in small groups and one to one conferences.

Regie Routman Reading and Writing Connection video based series is supporting a group of teachers to delve deeper into building the reciprocity between reading and writing. Highlights of learning include the following:

• It is important of providing enough opportunities for students to work through "We Do" stage of the Optimal Learning Model (Gradual Release Responsibility) by gradually shifting greater responsibility of learning to students before moving to the "You Do" stage.
• Including students in the organization and set up of the classroom library gives them greater ownership of books and materials.

Reggio Emilia Inquiry Team with over 30 teachers are meeting five times over the year to inquiry further into applying different aspects of Reggio inspired teaching and learning in classrooms from Kindergarten to Grade Five. Teachers are exploring:

• documentation of student learning, 
• inquiry base learning through the arts,
• environment as a third teacher
• Geography of Story Workshop (based on the Opal School model)

Finding Joy in Teaching Reading

This post is inspired by Jen Barker and her blog post about her one little word for 2014, JOY.  Her post connected me to a post about finding joy in school and learning by Chris Kennedy.  Today, with my colleague Marie, I spoke to parents about reading with children and the focus of our session was making reading joyful.

I think sometimes the pressure we feel to get all students reading at level xyz by a certain date, darkens our vision and makes the joy of reading harder to find.

 Find Joy in Teaching Reading:

1. Joy is contagious.  Share your own love of reading with your students.

2.  Read out loud to your students, daily, no matter what age.

3. Build a community of readers who share books, make recommendations and talk about books.

4.  Put phonics and phonemic awareness in their place.  There is a place for both of these pieces of the puzzle, but they are just that, pieces of the puzzle.

5.  Focus on meaning.  Reading is making meaning and interacting with text.  When we teach for meaning and teach students to think while their reading, this allows them to interact more freely with text and come to a better understanding of what they are reading.

6.  Let there be choice.  Time to read just right books (fluency level) and time to read just right books (passion level).

"Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him." -Maya Angelou

This post first appeared on Literacy in the Elementary Classroom by Lisa Schwartz, Teacher Consultant SD38 Richmond