Workshops: Literacy in Primary Years
Building Students' Literacy in Middle and Upper Primary while Making Meaning
Workshop Presentation Anna Clough
Developing essential literacy skills is vital to ensure our students have the best chance to succeed in their education and everyday life. The explicit teaching of literacy is crucial for all students to be able to completely comprehend and apply their knowledge and understanding. Weekly Writing Focus (WWF) is innovative pedagogy that promotes collaborative learning, peer to peer learning and mixed modes of communication while explicitly teaching literacy capabilities. Workshop topics include: Making meaning in literacy by reading and viewing, writing and representing and talking and listening, sharing innovating online pedagogy to implement a literacy program that students can not only engage with, but interact with, allowing all students to have success through targeted focus areas, student led and collaborative learning to check for understanding and reinforce concept, providing students quick, sustainable and quality feedback. Ways of presenting: Discussion and demonstration of pedagogy using platforms such as Blackboard Collaborate and Seesaw, showcasing and sharing parts of explicitly modeled lessons, group activities to model collaborative, student led learning. Participants in this workshop will be placed into groups and provided with the technology to connect to a real online learning environment. The purpose of this is to truly demonstrate the benefits of collaborative learning in an interactive classroom environment while making meaning through developing core literacy skills.
Multilingual Literacy in the Primary Classroom: How to Strengthen Student's Literacy Levels through Second Language Learning
Workshop Presentation Courtney Miels
Past trials of the Multilingual Literacy Approach have demonstrated that knowledge acquired through the learning of one language is a valuable resource in the learning of a second language. This is a reciprocal relationship that can improve the learning of both languages through carefully selected pedagogical practices and collaborative programs. Working with this understanding, language and classroom teachers can design a range of teaching and learning sequences that build learner agency and improve language and literacy outcomes. This year teachers at Open Access College are collaboratively designing and implementing Multilingual Literacy with their partnership schools. Through these partnerships teachers are positioned as learners, modelling how to learn languages and become literate shoulder to shoulder with kids and learn how to embed languages across learning areas. This workshop will present a background into the MLL Approach and the research that supports it. Demonstrations of the pedagogical practices and examples of student learning will provide insight into how you can design and implement an MLL program.
