Our staff has spent the first half of the year putting focused effort into better understanding the literacy needs of the students in the classroom and delving into shared resources that have been successful in their grade group in the past, new resources curated by our librarian, and exploring specific areas of need.

At our February staff meeting we wanted to do a check-in to see how movement is being made in strengthening our literacy instruction and what are areas that could use more support.  Each grade group met to answer the following four questions:

1. What is working well in literacy?  Strategies?  Routines?  Resources?
2. What are areas you are seeing successes?
3. What areas are you having a hard time reaching?
4. What specific supports do you need to be successful?  Resources? Release time?

Some of the strengths we are noticing:

• Direct support in reading groups where kids are grouped by similar ability
• Increased vocabulary use
• Improvement in sentence writing
• Answering questions in full sentences
• Finding “what/where is the evidence”
• Showing understanding through Story Workshop

Areas of the stretches we are noticing:

• Comprehension and drawing evidence from reading
• Fine motor and printing
• Motivation of students to dig deeper to show meaningful understanding
• Home reading done daily at all ages
• Conversations about reading and thinking critically about reading peer-to-peer as well as students engaging in conversation at home with families.

Our action of collecting reflections from the staff mid-way through the year has helped us celebrate and recognize positive movement towards our literacy goals and helped show the areas we can continue to support.  Moving forward we have committed to scheduling more collaboration time, increasing our resources for low vocab/high interest readers for middle year students, and communicating with families about the important role they play at home in helping to develop and grow literacy skills in their own children.