Focus: 2025/26

As a staff and community at Blair, we have worked hard to create a caring and inclusive environment where students feel safe, accepted, and are willing to challenge themselves to take risks with their learning. Our anti-racism work helped create a positive school community and respect for individual identities. Our broad inquiry question has been: 

How might we support learners in developing an understanding of their identity?  How might a stronger sense of identity help to foster a sense of belonging at Blair, and thus strengthen our community and support students with their learning?

For our 2025-2026 school year, our staff continue to work on and support our goals of building a safe and inclusive learning environment for all of our community members.  We believe celebrating diversity and individual gifts and strengths will support our learners in their personal and academic achievements.  Therefore, we want to focus our literacy goals around exploring the theme of "Story", including researching, sharing, and celebrating individuals' personal stories, and exploring ways to share personal stories.

Next Steps:

• continue to directly teach and model our school district values around Identity, Inclusivity, and belonging for all; create a safe space for learning
• connect with and engage our broader Blair community through activities that support diversity and inclusivity values
• directly teach and model appropriate uses of technology as ways to share personal stories, including digital literacy
• focus on literacy strategies to support personal writing, by encouraging a variety of methods to share personal stories, developing vocabulary, and understanding "audience" and "purpose" while developing "personal voice"
• support our literacy goals around the theme of "Story", including researching, sharing, and celebrating individuals' personal stories as a school community activity

School Learning Focus for the 2025-2026 School Year:

Our revised specific focus that has emerged throughout the school year is to improve reading outcomes for our students, especially for our primary students. We realized that many our early primary students were struggling with phonemic awareness, fluency and reading comprehension based on our SPARK reading data and our fall reading assessments, and our goal was to improve literacy outcomes for these students.

Evidence-Informed Rationale:

Our early primary team worked with students in the classroom and our educators noticed that our students were struggling with foundational reading skills. In particular, the Fall SPARK Reading Data for phonemic awareness was an important source of data. Improving the literacy outcomes of these students became our focus, and this is important because building strong literacy and reading skills in our early primary years is a foundational skill for our students!

Priority Learners:

Our primary teaching team has been focussing on specific groups of Kindergarten and Grade 1 (early primary) students to develop and support reading strategies.

Baseline Data:

When looking at our data, we were able to see that, for example: 

48% of our K/1 students were not able to isolate the final phoneme;

57% of our K/1 students were not able to blend phonemes;

64% of our K/1 students were not able to identify 2 phoneme segmentation.

This is some of the data that revealed a trend of struggling readers in our early primary years and became a focus for our team.

Action Statement:

Our teachers began to plan strategies to implement with our students to advance our focus of improvements in primary literacy outcomes. Our teachers began specific actions:

-whole-class specific instruction on phonemic awareness

-small-group instruction to teach smaller groups of students

-targeted intervention for specific students

Intended Impact:

With the specific actions of our teachers, we expect to see improvements in our primary students’ literacy outcomes. We expect more of our students to be able to reach proficiency with phonemic awareness by the end of grade 1. We also expect to see more confident, fluent readers demonstrating proficiency reading at grade level.

Evidence of Impact:

We will look for specific data to indicate that our work has made a positive impact on our students’ literacy outcomes. We will look at:

-Term 2 English Language Arts proficiency indicators compared to Term 1

-Spring SPARK phonemic awareness data compared to Fall data

-Spring Reading Assessment data compared to Fall data

Alignment Statement:

Our school focus aligns with our school district strategic priorities as Strategic Priority #1, “Success for All Learners“, commits to the work of every learner to achieve their highest potential.  Objective #1 is to “improve literacy outcomes.”