Cambridge Public Elementary School expresses pride in itself
Students and staff at Cambridge Public Elementary School have good reason to be proud of themselves.
Principal Susan Kelly presented Upper Canada District School Board trustees (UCDSB) with a progress report, during the Feb. 22 board meeting, on the school’s success with its CPS School Improvement Plan for Student Achievement. The goal of the plan is to meet the UCDSB’s own standards for curriculum excellences and so meet or beat the Ontario Education Ministry’s guidelines.
The CPS plan is designed to help students improve their math and reading skills, including both speed and comprehension. Recent education skills studies suggest that improvement in understanding non-fiction text, like essays and news reports, will also lead to improvements in understanding all other forms of text, like general reading and writing.
Cambridge Public’s student improvement plan puts more emphasis on the use of nonfiction in its literacy programming to help improve students’ ability to understand what they are reading. Staff makes regular use of non-fiction vocabulary and also various assessment techniques, strategies and practices. These same techniques are part of the UCDSB’s own Summer Learning program.
The non-fiction text helps broaden the students’ own general knowledge and also helps them better understand other nonfiction texts, like news reports, printed instructions for doing some task, and such. They are also better able to read and understand and appreciate non-fiction works like essays, biographies, and also general fiction.
The CPS plan also makes use of graphs and charts to help show students the goals they can set for themselves with their literacy skills. As part of the program, the school has also increased the number of non-fiction books available for children to read in the classrooms and in the learning common areas.
In the field of mathematics, Cambridge Public teachers are using daily number talks to help students say out loud what they are thinking when trying to work through an arithmetic problem to the correct answer. The school is providing more training for staff on how to identify what kinds of strategies individual students use to problem solve, and to help teach them more efficient ways appropriate to their grade level to get the correct answers.