The Observation Survey includes 6 tasks:
Letter Identification - Students are asked to identify capital and lower case letters in any way they can.
Word Test - Students read a list of 20 words.
Concepts about Print - This task identifies what children know about how print works.
Writing Vocabulary - Students are given 10 minutes to write as many words as they can.
Hearing and Recording Sounds in Words- A short story is dictated and students are asked to record the sounds they hear.
Text Reading - Students are asked to read text and their level is identified

The following is an example from 2018-2019 of what parents can do at home to support phonological awareness with their child at home.
Each month has approximately 10 or more very short activities you can do with your child, and it includes the answers you should expect from your child.

If parents did these 5 simple things they would greatly improve their child's readiness for school and reading. These suggestions come from a former Reading Recovery Teacher and a mother of a very early reader.

Strategies for parents and educators to encourage children to read — from infancy to high school

This professional development covers why reading is the cornerstone of all education and the PeBL philosophy.
Reading is demystified into the components that all students need to read. Then strategies and the transfer of responsibility are used supporting the Saskatchewan Reads framework.
The materials used through out the presentation are included in the folder for this presentation in the PeBL ELA Team group in the folder entitled "Reading PD (PeBL Mentor PD).
Contact any members of the team for further information.

The purpose of this supporting document is to provide samples of assessment and evaluation tools teachers may use/adapt for their students as teachers implement an effective English Language Arts program.

This playful phonological awareness activity to build rhyming skills using colors. Lots of fun for preschoolers and early readers!

If you’re looking for a way to teach your student/child to recognize rhyming words, try these free printable clip cards!

Strategic reading allows students to monitor their own thinking and make connections between texts and their own experiences. Students who make connections while reading are better able to understand the text they are reading. It is important for students to draw on their prior knowledge and experiences to connect with the text. Students are thinking when they are connecting, which makes them more engaged in the reading experience.

Students gain a deeper understanding of a text when they make authentic connections. However, teachers need to know how to show students how a text connects to their lives, another text they have read, or the world around them. In this strategy guide, you will learn how to model text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections for your students so that they may begin to make personal connections to a text on their own.

In this strategy guide, you’ll learn how to use kidwatching to track and support student learning. Teachers observe and take notes on students’ understanding of skills and concepts and then use the observations to determine effective strategies for future instruction.

Yetta Goodman popularized the term kidwatching, the practice of “watching kids with a knowledgeable head” (9). In kidwatching, teachers observe students’ activities, noticing how they learn and what they do to explore their ideas. Teachers then examine anecdotal notes and other evidence to see how and when students engage in learning. After this review, teachers use their observations to differentiate activities to meet the needs of individual students. The strategy is based on “a seek-to-understand stance by attempting to look at life, literacy, and learning through the children’s eyes” (Mills 2). By discovering how students learn, teachers are able to choose the most effective strategies for each pupil.

In this strategy, students read aloud to each other, pairing more fluent readers with less fluent readers. Likewise, this strategy can be used to pair older students with younger students to create “reading buddies.” Additionally, children who read at the same level can be paired to reread a text that they have already read, for continued understanding and fluency work. This research-based strategy can be used with any book or text in a variety of content areas, and can be implemented in a variety of ways.

This site offers several online decodable books covering different letter sounds while introducing phonetic and sight words. Reading prompts and discussion points are imbedded throughout the book, with discussion questions at the end.

Grab these free syllable clip cards today! Great for preschoolers and early readers.

The good reasons this skill of counting syllables has shifted down to pre-readers as they begin to make sense of the world of literacy:
- When kids can chunk words into syllables, they can read longer words more quickly, accurately, and fluently.
- Beginning spellers do better when they can break words into pieces.

This resource lists the skills necessary to develop reading skills in students from birth on!
This resource is excellent for parents and early literacy teachers.
Oral language is key! Put devices down and talk to children as much as possible. Read to children every night. These are some of the foundations included. Read the document for more information on developing literacy in young children.

A video that shows you how to use running records to determine next steps for students.

This extensive website offers tons of ELA resources to support the learners in your classroom. Although some of the resources are American, there are lots of gems here. Be sure to check out the instructional strategies tools, mentor sentences, plus lots of other valuable resources.

"Saskatchewan Reads is a companion document to the English Language Arts Grades 1, 2, and 3 curricula. It was created based on sound research, specifically in reading, focusing on instructional approaches, assessment and intervention. Some of the key authors referenced include; Allington, Miller, Fountas and Pinnell, Davies, Cooper, Fisher & Frey to name a few. Furthermore, it showcases the diversity of promising practises that have proven successful in school divisions and First Nations communities within Saskatchewan. Some examples include: Picture Word Inductive Model (PWIM), Reader’s Workshop, Balanced Literacy, Scaffolded/Guided Reading, Levelled Literacy Intervention and Running Records along with many others across the province.

The intent of Saskatchewan Reads is to provide a framework for school divisions and systems to build their own reading initiative that meets the needs of their unique student population. This document provides practical supports to teachers as they ensure their students are successful. It is intended to develop increased capacity at the school and system level with respect to improving student reading. The online version of Saskatchewan Reads saskatchewanreads.wordpress.com will be evergreen with live links and video of examples to clearly illustrate the many promising practices within Saskatchewan. The intent of the online version is to bring Saskatchewan Reads alive.

The motivation to create Saskatchewan Reads came from the need to improve student reading in this province as outlined in the Premier’s vision document, “Saskatchewan Plan for Growth: Vision 2020 and Beyond”. All 28 school boards in the province and the Government of Saskatchewan approved the development and deployment of Saskatchewan Reads.

Several Saskatchewan publications, along with documents from other provinces, were referenced when creating Saskatchewan Reads. As a result of this work, and more importantly, the skill and talent of our teachers in this province, our students will become proficient readers."