Our focus for staff learning is on creating classrooms that are conducive to reading development. At our September professional learning day we were fortunate to be able to have Leyton Schnellert present to our staff on the area of reading and student engagement. Leyton is a professor at UBCO and is an expert in the field of literacy development. He came back to Brighouse on December 9th and 10th  of December, to work in classes. Teachers from a variety of grade groups had the opportunity to team teach with Mr. Schnellert and develop new ways to present literature and teach literacy in their classrooms. 

Some of the other strategies that we use at Brighouse to help support our students are listed below: 

• Targeted resource support – such as LLI and Wilson for those students who may need extra individual or small group instruction 

·Through a COLLABORATIVE process of placing our learning support team we prioritized pull out ELL groups for students who have little to no English with two of our ELL specialists. We determined that this was necessary through looking at our school population data 

·At Brighouse we purposefully placed members of our resource team so that they would have some flexibility in supporting our most vulnerable learners 

·We have also prioritized updating and supplementing classroom libraries and guided reading materials for primary students – which was approved through our school budget process 

We are excited to see how our students’ literacy skills grow as the year progresses.