As part of our commitment to improving reading instruction, our school has received a district grant. This grant provides our staff with dedicated time to collaborate with each other and with district specialists to enhance their teaching and better support students.

Core Themes: The central focus  is on strengthening students' reading and comprehension skills. Key recurring themes among teachers include:

• Comprehension Strategies: Explicitly teaching students how to make personal connections to texts, make inferences (read between the lines), summarize, predict, and identify main ideas versus supporting details.
• Decoding and Fluency: Building foundational skills in phonics, letter-sound recognition, and reading with expression.
• Vocabulary Growth: Intentionally building students' vocabulary through word walls, context clues, and direct instruction.
• Working with Diverse Texts: Using a variety of materials, including picture books, graphic novels, non-fiction articles, and digital media, to practice literacy skills.

Goals:

• Empower students with a toolkit of reading strategies so they can confidently tackle and understand any text they encounter.
• Increase students' self-regulation and confidence in their own reading abilities.
• Foster a deeper understanding and enjoyment of reading by connecting literacy skills to all areas of learning, including Science and Social Studies.

Key Action Items: To achieve these goals, teachers are planning to:

• Collaboratively design lessons and units that integrate these literacy strategies.
• Use specific teaching tools like graphic organizers, sentence starters, and group discussions to support student thinking.
• Model reading strategies explicitly and provide students with plenty of opportunities to practice.
• Regularly check in on student progress through observation, reading conferences, and reviewing student work to guide the next steps in their learning.
• Continue hosting schoolwide reading events – like Family Teams picnic reading, Family Teams flashlight reading, buddy reading, and our annual Family Literacy Night.