Literacy and Numeracy at Leila North

At Leila North, we pride ourselves on our strong academic programming. We see literacy development and

numeracy development as the heart of our learning. These components are rich in our classrooms but also

strongly connected to the arts, athletics, and TAA programming. Please find attached a snapshot of children

engaged in literacy and numeracy activities.

Throughout the months of January and February in ELA, rooms 11 and 18 participated in a study of World War

II and The Holocaust. Among other movies, we watched “Paper Clips,” a story of learning about The Holocaust

in a small town in America. We also read the story of Hana Brady in Hana’s Suitcase. It is a true story

connecting the events of The Holocaust to present day Japan and Canada as a Japanese Holocaust educator

uncovered Hana’s story through the contents of her suitcase.

After we finished our learning we wanted to share our learning with others in our school and our community,

especially because Holocaust denial is on the rise and 66% of Canadian millennials do not know about the

events of the Holocaust.

We created a museum in our classroom and had visits from most of the other grade 6 students as well as

some grade 7 classes both from our school and from H.C. Avery. Over the course of a week, over 300 students

and teachers visited our classroom displays.

Some of the displays were research based providing information on gas chambers, life in the camps, and even

survivor stories. Other students created more artistic pieces expressing their understanding of their learning

through art and poetry. Students were also welcomed to write articles reporting the atrocities of The

Holocaust, essays, or letters to the author or characters in the story about what they “witnessed”.

There was a great deal of pride as students shared their learning with the community, in our classroom, and in

the school newsletter. Not only did their pieces reflect their excellent skills, it also reflected their

thoughtfulness and attention providing hope and inspiration for the future. Never Again!

Photo: Students gathered in a simulated boxcar to better understand the Nazi transports to and from the camps.

Our Learning Support team worked on a new initiative! As a team, we felt that we lacked a variety of

interesting or appropriate reading material for our students who find reading challenging. We had a lot of

Paul Kropp, high-interest and easier-to-read graphic novels, however the content wasn’t always of interest to

the students. Many of our children prefer reading with simpler language and more visual support as it makes

reading more enjoyable.

We decided to invest in some new texts for our Learning Support Lending Library. We particularly liked a set of

books we found with a variety of material: fiction, non-fiction, brochures, leaflets, magazine articles and

informational texts. It reflects real-life reading with meaning.

Once a signing out system was established, we began to introduce the library boxes to our students.

Immediately, all the students liked being able to have a wider variety of choice, leafing through the boxes and

picking what they wanted to read. These books have been used successfully with all learners. We hope to

continue to grow our Lending Library.

This year in Mme. Claeys’s grade 7 class, students took the time to look at the different ways we could tie the

arts to our classroom curriculum in ways that encouraged student leadership, self-management, and creative

expression. Through class discussions, we decided to create a music video. It married Social Studies content

with Human Rights along with text interpretation/figurative language from English. The only element provided

to the students was the song “We’re Not Gonna Take It!” by Twisted Sister. It was up to the students in their

teams, to come together and create a clear expression of how they felt towards their own human rights

regarding education.

The students spoke with peers, teachers, family, and were able to spend time at the Human Rights Museum to

gather personal and historical references. Through this project, students grew into leaders and active

listeners. The ideas shared among students who normally did not move within the same social circles, came

together to make something fun, passionate, and a little goofy. It was something that had a clear message

and represented an incredibly personal stamp of power.

In Madame Silver’s room we looked at literacy, specifically writing, as a multi-layered process. In particular, we

focused on how our writing can be expressive and help us engage in our exploration of the world.

Mme Silver’s room! By treating our writing as a multi-step process with multiple edits that don't necessarily

have a conclusion, only an endpoint, we were able to open ourselves up to a greater willingness to change.

Suggestions, rather than being perceived

as criticisms of a finished product, were

viewed with excitement and enthusiasm,

with a strong sense of purpose being

improvement and refinement. Students

focused on adding artistry to their work

through vocabulary changes and

exploration, and by putting themselves in

the mindset of their reader. We did not

look at spelling, grammar, or readability

until the final few steps of the process. By

this time, the students were highly

invested in their work and saw these

changes as necessary to help

communicate a message, rather than

simply as another academic exercise.

The work was designed for students to

express their personal voice in their

writing. Their topics were carefully and

specifically chosen to be topics they cared

about deeply; that care made them value

each step in the process much more highly.

They were able to emphasize what was

important to them and to use their own

personal experiences to guide themselves

through the process.

Student abstract art inspired by the primary emotions in their

written piece about loneliness, losing friends, and making new.

One highly important aspect of our writing this year was questioning the world around us and the world we

experience vicariously through our reading, our families, and our media. Students were encouraged to examine

and evaluate their understanding of the world, as well as gather additional information from various sources.

Their experience in expressing themselves and what is important to them helped them find their message and

communicate it on an emotional level to their audience.

Ms. Vermette’s class! What is literacy? By the standard definition, it is the ability to read and write. In room 8,

we have tried to look at literacy as a skill set that helps a person to be more competent and knowledgeable in

a specific area, whatever area that may be. The students of room 8 enter the reading and/or writing “zone” by

choosing what they want to read or write about daily. This year we have had the opportunity to work with an

“expert” to help us improve the way we look at literacy. Over the course of the year, this “expert” would come

into our room and engage us through story, and teach us how to become better readers and writers. He

taught us that one of our favourite ways to demonstrate comprehension is to write a 6-word synthesis. It is

simply a take on the story of how Ernest Hemmingway once wrote a story using only 6 words. “For sale: baby

shoes, never worn”. Room 8 literacy could then be described as: “Choice, voice: creating success for all”.

The library started an Instagram account this year (@leilanorthlibrary) to highlight new books, student book reviews, and other events going on in the library. The library also offered Scholastic Reading Club to students who don't have it in class and bought great new Indigenous resources, books on sustainable development and social issues, manga, and various French and English fiction.

Mme Pirot’s room! Ever wonder what teachers are doing when they go to workshops? Let me tell you all about it. In early September, I noticed a Writer’s Workshop being offered to those teaching Gr.6 – Gr.12. Being new to Middle Years, I wondered if this would help me be better at teaching writing in my new grade assignment. During our first meeting, Mr. Korsunsky, who insisted we call him Mr. K., rolled out his plan on how to teach writing. At the end of the meeting, he asked if we were confused yet. It took everything in me not to shout “YES! I am not following your explanation of the writing process, Mr. K…I am beyond confused.”

I decided not to share how I was feeling and promised myself to keep an open mind to his madness. Over the course of the next few months, we were invited to observe Mr. K delivering writing lessons in teachers’ classrooms that had participated in his workshops the previous year. I was hooked on his philosophy after witnessing students I had taught in early years, develop their storytelling abilities after as few as two writing lessons. I took the information back to my classroom and started implementing Mr. K’s approach to teaching writing. My goal was to develop writers who were independent, who could identify their intended audiences and the purpose for their messages.

My hope is that I’ve ignited my students to be lifelong learners, who generate meaningful questions about topics for which they are passionate or simply just want to know more information. I knew I had achieved many of my goals, when students would articulate or write about their thoughts and opinions on a variety of meaningful topics that were of interest to them. I cannot wait to see where they go with their newly found skills!

Dance-- By Michaelyn

Practice practice

Till competition day

Bright bright

In the morning

Dark dark

In the night

Makeup makeup

Hair all the way

Costumes costumes

Shine and sparkle

Nerves nerves

Till backstage

Faces faces

To the judges

Families families

Cheer you on

Congrats congrats

We just won again

Project-based learning focuses students on a task or issue that requires skills in virtually every subject. Most

recently, students in Mr. MacFarlane’s grade 8 class used Minecraft, a 3D Virtual World and popular game, to

create a medieval community. Their task required them to create maps, write letters, create art, perform

calculations, analyze texts, gather research, and then represent their understanding through the structures

they created in their virtual world.

All content areas were propped up around the Medieval theme from the Social Studies curriculum. For ELA we

read a book called, “There Will Be Wolves” about a young girl training to be an apothecary, basically a

medieval pharmacist and healer, who travelled on the crusades to Jerusalem. The story offered opportunities

to explore medieval hierarchies and world views as well as a context for relating information about the people

and events of the time and their lasting impact.

Grade 8 science includes a unit on cells and body systems. Keeping with the medieval theme, students

explored medieval diseases, their effects on the body, symptoms, treatments, and prevention. In the context

of their medieval village, they had to determine ways of communicating this information to the non-literate

peasants through speeches and wordless posters (Art). For math, students applied their understandings of

scale, surface area, and volume to their structures in Minecraft.

One of the benefits of learning through projects is that it softens the perceived barriers between subject

areas. It illustrates that addressing problems, both inside and outside of school, often require a variety of

skills. Within a school day, it also reduces the need for abrupt shifts from one subject to another merely

because the clock says so.

Numeracy at Leila North

Mr. Alexander and the Cribbage connection! When I first became a teacher, I knew that I wanted to

incorporate Cribbage into my numeracy program. The game has so many incredible connections to mental

math, strategy, and estimation, but most importantly, I have so many fond memories playing with my dad and

my nana. I enjoy how quickly the students pick up the game and how involved and competitive they can

become. However, what I love most is when they come back to school after winter holidays and spring break

and they talk about how they played Cribbage with their parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles at a family

gathering.

In October, Mrs. Biggar’s class teamed up with Mrs. Werenich’s class and unloaded a wagon full of pumpkins

for Math. During “Pumpkin Math”, the students worked in groups and estimated the number of seeds in their

pumpkin. Once we cut into the pumpkin, many eager (and some not so eager) hands dove into the pumpkin

guts to pull out all the seeds. Students counted and grouped the seeds. After they recorded their data, we

taught them how to design bar graphs to represent the data gathered from each pumpkin group. Each group

compared their results and graphs. We found out that it did not matter how large your pumpkin was, it might

not have had the most seeds in it. The pumpkins were sent home to be carved into jack o lanterns and/or

made into pumpkin pies.

A theme this year in room 18 is that math is all around us. Not only

this, but it is a language we use to communicate thoughts and ideas.

Throughout the year we have been putting these ideas into practice,

seeking out the math around us to better explain things, such as

cell phone addiction and why apps are monetized the way they are.

This was a project that resulted in surveys being completed and

posters being put up explaining the results. More recently, we went

outside to the outdoor classroom to examine math in nature.

This particular activity had students looking at the ratio of a tree’s

circumference to its diameter (the number pi, or 3.1415…). Numeracy

in schools has become much more than completing, for example,

questions 6-30 on pg. 145. It is engaging, thought provoking,

and made to be evident in our students’ lives.

Ms. Werenich’s Math Playground! These are some of the 20 different math centres my students experienced

this year. Some were partner activities while others were individual challenges. Each centre has 3 levels of

difficulty. Students were given “Passports” to fill in as they accomplished each centre. During Math

Playground time, students could rotate from centre to centre at anytime and could only advance to the next

level if they met the criteria for completing the previous level. Each time we did these centres I introduced a

couple of new centres and rotated them each time until students had experienced them all. After successfully

completing one centre, the students would write reflections in their “Passports” about the challenges they

faced, their favourite part, and the skills they practiced. ALL students could participate; within the 20 centres

there were activities of a variety of levels of play. Those that needed even more of a challenge were invited to

design a fourth level.

Cards Digits

Coloured Crossings

Tangram