In order to determine our direction for the year in terms of literacy, we had to first do some scanning and assessment of our students' current skills.  Together with our learning resource team, classroom teachers administered a school-wide assessment of students' reading skills, focusing on concepts of text (K), fluency (gr 2 and up), decoding (gr 1 and up) and comprehension (all). Our expectation this early in the year, is not that students are proficient in all areas, but rather to determine where there are both individual and trending strengths and areas in need of development to help us plan next steps for classes and individual students.  While we will continue to teach students strategies to develop skills in decoding text and in comprehending meaning in text and story, assessing comprehensively helps us to identify a direction of focus.  Our students generally demonstrate a developing and proficient understanding of decoding- knowledge of letter sounds, and ability to read words, sentences, and lengthier and more sophisticated text in the intermediate grades.  Teachers can support students who are demonstrating an emerging understanding of these skills in different ways- sometimes reframing an activity, or working on an area of focus with a smaller group for a period of time.  We can see that continuing to build students' understanding and use of vocabulary would be supportive of all our students.  We can also see that developing an increasingly sophisticated and engaged understanding of story- both sharing/writing and comprehending could build literacy skills.