Through the Classroom Enhancement Fund (CEF), our team of grade 3/4 and 4/5 teachers came together this year to explore ways to best support their learners in their literacy development. The team communicated that, from the beginning of the school year, they were noticing gaps with their learners in a variety of areas when it came to the literacy levels of their students, particularly in the areas of their writing, phonological awareness, spelling, and comprehension.

Back in October, the team explored an important Inquiry Question, which was:

How can we develop phonological awareness and phonics through spelling and literacy activities?

The inquiry question guided the team to begin with a focus on supporting all learners in building strong foundational literacy skills. During classroom activities and targeted instruction, students made progress in the important building blocks for reading and spelling such as learning to hear, identify, and manipulate sounds in words.

As we shifted toward the second and third terms, the team built on this foundation. The focus moved from learning about phonological awareness toward using the skills in their writing – an exciting next steps for learners in their literacy development. The goals for the team included:

• Supporting students in moving beyond simple sentences, supporting them in expanding their ideas and using transitions to connect thoughts.
• Guiding students in paragraph writing and learning how to identify the main idea and using proper capitalization and punctuation
• Learning about the writing process – teaching students how to write, edit, and proofread their work

The team then embarked on exploring professional learning opportunities where they were able to observe expert teachers during literacy instruction and then incorporated what they had learned into their own practice. They also collaborated as a team to continue to follow their comprehensive year plan of literacy instruction and worked together to organize how they delivered literacy instruction in a meaningful and explicit way throughout the year.

Here is the learning journey of the Grade 3/4 students as shared by their teacher. We hope their story reflects the many ways their teachers supported their literacy growth and highlights all that contributed to their learning as part of the project.

At the beginning of the school year, the class focused on phonological awareness and phonics to support foundational literacy skills. As the students learned and showed progress, spelling was brought into broader literacy activities, emphasizing vocabulary development and reading comprehension, particularly identifying main ideas and supporting details in texts.

Once students became more confident in recognizing the main ideas, the team introduced paragraph writing, starting with crafting introductions and a main ideas. The Grade 3/4 class took gradual steps, using checklists to guide their writing—focusing on capitalization, punctuation, and sentence variety. The students shared their work, discussed vocabulary, and modeled writing through read-alouds, all of which allowed them to gradually transition students from listening to writing their own pieces.

Overall, over the course of the year the teachers noticed that their students showed growth in identifying the main idea and details in text read and in writing a paragraph. As they became more confident writers, they were able to expand some ideas so that they were able to avoid just writing simple sentences. They also worked on other skills like conjunctions, transition words and vocabulary.

Please see the attached photos for samples of how the students were assessed and how they were provided with feedback regarding their learning.

We are proud of the collaboration and commitment our CEF team of teachers has shown in supporting student learning, as well as the resiliency and effort our students have demonstrated in reaching their true potential. Well done, everyone!