Each month, Principal Scott Briske spotlights learning happening at Wildwood Elementary School. For his latest spotlight, Principal Briske shared about a new professional development resource our teachers use at Wildwood to inform their teaching practice.
This Spotlight was featured in the September 28 issue of the Wildwood Elementary School eNews.
Each year before school starts, our teachers look at data and set year-long goals for themselves and our school. We have multiple goals around academics, social-emotional wellness, and school culture. In this principal’s spotlight, I’m going to share with you our literacy goals and action plans. Using academic data, we were able to see that we wanted to improve the decoding and reading fluency skills at our school and are using a new resource for that work.
This year, we are implementing a new literacy resource program that we refer to as UFLI because it is from the University of Florida Literacy Institute. UFLI is a program that teaches students the foundational skills necessary for proficient reading. It follows a carefully developed plan that is designed to ensure that students acquire each literacy skill needed and learn to apply these skills with confidence. This program supports the LETRS training the Wildwood staff did last year. Our staff goals around our new resource include:
Consistency with the UFLI resource
Common understanding, common language, and common communication about the resource and how it’s being taught
In theory, a child could go to any classroom and receive very similar/the same phonics instruction (consistent instruction)
Being intentional in having sharing conversations among teams
Each month, we have a team of dedicated teachers who meet and progress monitor how the new resource is working. We want to ensure that we are getting the academic results we want with our students in each grade level. Our team will look at the data, discuss implementation, and adjust if needed.
Please see the photos below of our teachers at each grade level implementing UFLI.
Thank you for your partnership,
Mr. Scott Briske, Principal, Wildwood Elementary School
Kindergarten classes are introducing the letter M and students are adding the letter to the beginning and ending of words.
First-grade students are finding words they know in a story and working on comprehension, both as a group and individually.
Second-grade students are reviewing short vowel sounds and consonant clusters (like slip).
