The document discusses strategies for teaching literacy to grades 4-9, emphasizing the importance of understanding, connection, and communication in reading. It advocates for performance-based assessments to identify student strengths and create targeted action plans, promoting collaboration between support and classroom teachers. Various teaching methods, including guided reading and interactive read-alouds, are highlighted to engage students and enhance their literacy skills.

1. Literacy Grades 4-9: Finding a
balance that works for your
class
SD 20 Kootenay-Columbia
Oct 18, 2019
Faye Brownlie
Slideshare.net/fayebrownlie.sd20.literacy4-9.oct2019

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.

8. 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

9. Relationship Between TeacherSupport and Student Controlin Reading
Interactive
Read-Aloud
Shared
Reading
Guided Reading
With
Leveled
Books
Lit
Circles
Independent
Reading
Oral Language – “Reading and writing are floating on a sea of talk” - James Britton
Adapted by Faye Brownlie from 2017 Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell from Guided Reading, Second Edition Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann
Literacy is the ability and willingness tomake meaning from textand express oneself ina 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
It's all about making meaning. All the subsets of reading— fluency, decoding, vocabulary development — are important in how they help the
reader derive meaning from text. All aspects of writing — from letter-sound relationship to the construction of sentences and the use of vocabulary
are basedon communicating.
High
Student
Control
Low
Student
Control
High
Teacher
Support
Low
Teacher
Support

10. Strategy Sequence
• Connecting
• Building motivation, accessing and building background knowledge, asking
questions, setting a purpose for reading
• Processing
• Making sense of new text, linking old information to new
• Transforming and personalizing
• Showing what you know

11. No plan, no point

18. Texts chosen in SD 20, grades 3-9
• Hungry Plants
• Discover Arctic Canada
• Tunnel Vision
• Paper or Plastic or Cotton?
• Underground Adventures
• Sitting Pretty or Selling Out?
• Making Music

19. Explode the Sentence
The Sinner’s Sorrow was made all of wood, and rose as high as the
Admiral’s bulging belly.
Scar Island – Dan Gemeinhart

20. Strategy Sequence
• Connecting
• Building motivation, accessing and building background knowledge, asking
questions, setting a purpose for reading
• Processing
• Making sense of new text, linking old information to new
• Transforming and personalizing
• Showing what you know