Literacy

The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1–8: Language, 2023  is grounded in the belief that all students can succeed when they develop knowledge and skills in language and literacy. Strong foundational knowledge and skills in both oral and written language are necessary to support more complex skills such as critical thinking and problem solving.

The Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board prioritizes creating a strong foundation for student achievement through literacy and provides a variety of support, resources and assistance for educators, students and families.

The revised curriculum describes the knowledge and skills that students are expected to learn. It is organized in four distinct but interrelated areas: 

1. Literacy Connections and Applications, 

2. Foundations of Language, 

3. Comprehension: Understanding and Responding to Texts, 

4. Composition: Expressing Ideas and Creating Texts with language and literacy skills being taught and assessed throughout all areas of learning. 

Additionally, this curriculum emphasizes evidence-based systematic and explicit instruction of foundational knowledge and skills, including oral language (including phonological awareness) , word-level reading and spelling (phonics), vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.

Structured literacy is an evidence-based approach to systematically and explicitly teaching

• phonemic awareness, 

• phonics, (word reading and spelling)

• fluency, 

• vocabulary, 

• listening and reading comprehension, and 

• written expression.

These skills, however, do not exist in isolation and students will develop them simultaneously, with an understanding of how the skills are connected. This interconnectedness is reflective to the changes found in the report card where there is now one mark given for language. 

KPRDSB resources and programs supportive of evidence-based systematic and explicit instruction of foundational knowledge and skills include:

• Tier 1 classroom resources: For example, Readers Now, Lecteurs Maintenant KPR resource, Heggerty, UFLI Foundations, Wiley Blevins texts, Shifting the Balance, Bringing Metis Children’s Literature to Life collection, Taanishi Book Series, Culturally Relevant and Responsive Pedagogy Toolkit

• Early Intervention Educators

• Regional Literacy Coaches

• Empower Intervention

• Multilingual Language Resources: Differentiating Instruction for the Multilingual Learners, STEP resource

• Differentiating Instruction for Students with Special Education Needs

• Special Education KPR resource

• Equity, Diversity and Inclusion KPR resource

• Indigenous Education KPR resource

Additionally, the French as a Second Language  (2013) curriculum currently supports the language needs in KPR’s French Immersion and Core French classrooms with additional resources for educators found within Readers Now/Lecteurs Maintenant.

Culturally Relevant and Responsive Pedagogy

In response to the recommendations in the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s Right to Read inquiry report, the language curriculum is designed to equip each student with the solid foundational knowledge and skills necessary to achieve their full potential. The language curriculum is founded on the principle that every student can become an effective communicator. It recognizes that students come from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, bringing unique identities, abilities, and resources to their language and literacy learning. 

KPRDSB understands the importance of Culturally Relevant and Responsive Pedagogy and strives to create learning environments reflective of students’ lived experiences and identities. The Considerations for Program Planning embedded within the Language Curriculum and the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion KPR resource are effective resources for supporting tier 1 instructional decisions that support all students.

Literacy Supports for Parents and Guardians 

A Guide for Parents is a thought provoking resource that provides ideas and considerations for supporting readers in their home environment. This guide offers parents information about how the curriculum was developed, what students will learn by grade and what the learning focus of each strand is and how they interconnect with each other. Additionally, the “support your child’s learning” tab offers suggestions for how to encourage, participate and promote literacy in your home with easy to implement ideas that can be tailored to support a child of any age.

Below is a list of ideas that can support students of any age:

• Keep reading with your child. Read a variety of material – magazines, e-books, poems and comic books

• Tap into their interests and hobbies – children are more likely to explore what they are interested in.

• Read some of the same books and materials as your child, so you can talk about characters, stories and topics together.

• Find fun and meaningful opportunities for children to write, or for you to write together. Some examples: create greeting cards, shopping lists, party invitations, gratitude notes, posters, records of special events, and so on.

When Reading Together:

Beginning readers:

• Encourage the reader to attend to the letters in the word, scanning from left to right and identifying the sounds they know

• Encourage the reader to be flexible and consider other sounds that letter or letter pattern makes

• When sounding words out, the reader may benefit from reminders to hold sounds that can be sustained (e.g /m/) to blend to the next sound. When a reader pauses between each sound, /m/ — /a/— /t/, it can be difficult for some readers to distinguish the word they just sounded out

• Support the reader with words the reader does not know the sounds of and irregular words they have not been taught. The goal is to avoid reinforcing guessing as a helpful strategy for tackling unknown words

• Talk about new words and discuss their meanings

• Take breaks with longer texts and discuss the reader’s understanding of what they have read

• Identify and discuss if a word changes when parts are added to the beginning of the word (prefix) or the end of the word (suffix). These word parts have meaning and can change the meaning and pronunciation of words.

More experienced readers:

• There will be additional opportunities with multisyllabic words to discuss the meaningful word parts and how they can support the reader when faced with an unfamiliar word. For example, “I am not sure what metamorphic rock is, but I do know that “morph” means to change. I think that can help me.”

• Encourage the reader to think critically about what they are reading. Ask questions that promote the reflection of questions like, whose voice is represented? who is representing these voices? whose voice is missing?

References:

The Ontario Language Curriculum 2023

Glossary:

• Tier 1 strategies - Instructional strategies used by an educator that are beneficial to all students.

• Systematic and explicit instruction - Tier 1 instruction used to deliver planned and organized material (based on research),in a clear and direct manner with built in opportunities to practice and respond.

• Prefix - A morpheme that precedes a base to form a different word (e.g., trans- before form or act).

• Suffix - A morpheme that is added to the end of a base to create a different word.

• Morpheme - The smallest unit of meaning within words. A morpheme can be either a prefix, a suffix, or a base. Words are made up of one or more morphemes.

• Phonological Awareness - The ability to reflect on the sound structure of spoken language, including the ability to identify and produce words that share the same rhyme, hear individual syllables within a word, and break a syllable into its onset and rime. 

• Phonics - The systematic and structured teaching of grapheme-phoneme correspondences and how to use these to decode/read and encode/spell words.