The document discusses effective literacy teaching and assessment strategies for grades 4-9, emphasizing the importance of creating readers who understand and enjoy reading. It outlines performance-based assessment methods, collaboration between teachers, and various instructional practices, such as read-alouds, guided reading, and independent reading. Key components include assessing strengths and areas for improvement, setting actionable plans, and fostering a community of learners through shared experiences in literacy.

1. Literacy Grades 4-9: Finding a
balance that works for your
class
SD 20 Kootenay-Columbia
May 6, 2019
Faye Brownlie
Slideshare.net/fayebrownlie.sd20.literacy4-9

2. Ministry of Education’s Definition of Literacy
Literacy is the ability and willingness to make meaning from
text and express oneself in a variety of modes and for a
variety of purposes.
Literacy includes making connections, analyzing critically,
comprehending, creating, and communicating.
B.C. Ministry of Education, 2017
2

3. Reading is understanding.
Reading is thinking.
Reading is making sense in
disciplines.

4. • Assessment is value driven.
• The assessment you choose must reflect what you value.
• So what do you value in reading? How does this match what your
curriculum values?

5. Reading Assessment
• The end goal of teaching reading is to create readers who read with
understanding and who choose to read.
• The end goal of a reading assessment is to determine the strengths
and areas to strengthen of a student’s reading with understanding.
• All students should be able to participate in the assessment, as
members of the community. How do we support all learners in the
assessment?

6. Purpose of Performance Based Reading
Assessment
• To determine class strengths and areas to strengthen
• To build a plan of action once these have been identified
• To return to the assessment to see if teaching has made a difference

7. Together we are better: Collaborate
• Assess
• Analyze and plan
• Teach
• Reassess
• When a support teacher and a classroom teacher work together to
analyze the assessment information and use it to help create a class
plan, there is an increased chance that ALL students will have more
consistent programming.

9. Assessment FOR Learning
PBA: performance-based assessment
• Whole group building background knowledge
• Guided by the protocol
• Whole group overview of performance tasks – the
thinking paper or response sheet
• Individual quick running record
• Individual interview
• Student text – non-fiction

10. Each grade, fall & spring, includes:
Teacher protocols:
• to guide the process
Thinking papers/student response sheets:
• students can show through drawing, writing and dialogue information about what they have
read
Running record/oral reading sheets:
• teachers do a running record and notice student’s concepts of print
Conference sheets:
• teachers conference individually with students to go deeper into their understanding
Reading for Information Performance Standard and Worksheet:
• teachers code each student’s performance on the grade level PS, then create a plan, using the
PS worksheet, based on the class’s strengths and stretches

11. No plan, no point

14. Texts chosen in SD 20
• Hungry Plants
• Discover Arctic Canada
• Tunnel Vision
• Paper or Plastic or Cotton?
• Underground Adventures

15. The Balance
• Whole class reading is thinking instruction
• Shared reading – modeling strategies and co-creating meaning
• Small group/guided reading/readers’ workshop/literature circles
• 1:1 conferences – oral reading, comprehension, feedback
• Choice and independent practice
• Daily writing, often connected to reading

16. The Power and Promise of Read-Alouds and
Independent Reading
Literacy Leadership Brief, ILA, 2018
• Read alouds
• From a variety of genres
• Invitation into the world of text, building vocabulary and background knowledge,
modeling thinking and engagement with text
• Complex instructional interactions
• Independent reading
• Self-selected text
• Explicit instruction about what, why, and how readers read
• Teacher monitoring and support during the reading
• Authentic conversation about what the students are reading
• Build engagement, motivation and joy in reading.
• “…the best readers are those who read the most and the poorest readers are those
who read the least.”

17. Think Aloud
• Teacher reads a sentence or 2 and thinks ‘aloud’ about how she/he is
constructing meaning
• Students identify the strategies the teacher has used
• Students are in reading pairs
• One student reads to his partner, and thinks ‘aloud’, explaining how
he is decoding and making sense
• Partner reflects back the strategies he notices and engages in
dialogue about the content
• Repeat with opposite roles for students

18. Toilet Fact
• Have you ever watched toilet water as it flushes? Which way does
the water spin?
• Excerpt from What Happens After You Flush? – Scholastic, Moving Up
in Literacy Place

19. • Sometimes the water goes down the toilet in a clockwise direction
and sometimes it goes down in a counter-clockwise direction. The
shape of the bowl and the angle of the water flowing into the bowl
determine which direction the water flows from the bowl.

20. Toilet Fact
• Did you know that toilets are called many different names? For
example, there is the throne, commode, john, loo and Ralph.

21. Toilet Fact
• Most toilets made today use only 6 litres of water per flush. Toilets
made before 1980 use 17-26 litres per flush.
• Scholastic
• Moving Up with Literacy Place, grades 4-6