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 is: 

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

***Our revised specific focus that has emerged throughout the 2025-2026 school year is improving reading achievement levels for our students, especially for our primary students. We realized that many our early primary students were struggling with phonemic awareness and reading comprehension, for example, based on our SPARK reading data and our fall reading assessments.

Our primary teaching team has been focussing on specific groups of primary students to develop and support reading strategies, including whole-class and targeted small-group reading strategies support for our students.

With the strategies that our teachers are implementing with our students, we hope that we see improvements in primary literacy data, specifically, in Term 2 English Language Arts proficiency indicators, Spring early primary SPARK phonemic awareness data, and our Spring Reading Assessment data.

Our school focus aligns with our school district strategic priorities as Literacy is one of our school’s and school district’s priorities.