2POBL

Course Profile Beginning Literacy, ELD Level 1, open, Public

Unit 1

Course Profiles are professional development materials designed to help teachers implement the new Grade 9 secondary school curriculum. These materials were created by writing partnerships of school boards and subject associations. The development of these resources was funded by the Ontario Ministry of Education and Training. This document reflects the views of the developers and not necessarily those of the Ministry. Permission is given to reproduce these materials for any purpose except profit. Teachers are also encouraged to amend, revise, edit, cut, paste, and otherwise adapt this material for educational purposes.

Any references in this document to particular commercial resources, learning materials, equipment, or technology reflect only the opinions of the writers of this sample Course Profile, and do not reflect any official endorsement by the Ministry of Education and Training or by the Partnership of School Boards that supported the production of the document.

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Acknowledgments

Public District School Board Writing Team - English Literacy Development

Lead Board

Toronto District School Board

Course Profile Writing Team

Jane Campbell

Hazel Excell

Denise Gordon

Jane Hill

Elaine Iannuzziello

Paula Markus (Team Leader)

Eleanor Minuk

Jane Sims

Ero Siouga

Betty Ann Taylor

Unit #1: Orientation to School Life

Time: 25 hours

Unit Developer(s): Jane Campbell, Hazel Excell, Denise Gordon, Jane Hill, Elaine Iannuzziello, Paula Markus, Eleanor Minuk, Jane Sims, Ero Siouga, Betty Ann Taylor

Development Date: April 1999

Unit Description:

In this introductory unit, students will begin to respond appropriately to oral instructions and information in a classroom setting and adapt to some key teacher expectations and school routines. Students will begin to understand some facts and concepts about printed texts such as school maps, school calendars, agenda books, and timetables, and will use basic patterns of standard Canadian English in several simple forms of writing.

Strands & Expectations:

Strand: Oral and Visual Communication

Overall Expectations: AORV.01L, AORV.02L, AORV.03L

Specific Expectations: AOR1.01L, AOR1.02L, AOR1.03L, AOR1.04L, AOR1.05L

Strand: Reading

Overall Expectations: AREV.01L, AREV.02L, AREV.03L

Specific Expectations: ARE1.03L, ARE1.04L, ARE1.05L, ARE2.01L, ARE2.03L, ARE2.04L, ARE2.05L, ARE3.01L, ARE3.02L, ARE3.04L

Strand: Writing

Overall Expectations: AWRV.01L

Specific Expectations: AWR1.01L, AWR1.02L

Strand: Social and Cultural Competence

Overall Expectations: ASCV.02L

Specific Expectations: ASC2.01L, ASC2.02L, ASC2.03L, ASEC.04L, ASC2.05L, ASC2.06L, ASC2.07L, ASC2.08L

Activity Titles (Time and Sequence)

Activity 1	Personal Information	2 hours
Activity 2	School Tools: Introduction to the Student Agenda Book and the Timetable	3 hours
Activity 3	School Maps and a Tour of the Plant	3 hours
Activity 4	Tell It! Write It! (Language Experience Story)	3 hours
Activity 5	Getting to Know More About You: Making Name Cards	2 hours
Activity 6	Creating a Personal Picture Dictionary	3 hours
Activity 7	School Routines: Learning Classroom and School Rules	5 hours
Activity 8	Unit project: Student Booklets	4 hours

Prior Knowledge Required

Teachers should make no assumptions about previous learning. Students placed in this course may have had no previous formal schooling at all. Furthermore, students will arrive with varying degrees of oral fluency. Some may be reluctant to speak and will begin to speak only after they have started to settle into the school. In all likelihood, students will not display for teachers their full oral ability at the start of the year. Activities are designed to enable teachers to assess, on an ongoing basis, the skill levels and previous knowledge of their students.

Orientation activities would be expanded or contracted depending on whether students were newly arrived or were repeating the course to complete the expectations and earn a credit. The focus of the orientation would be different in the second semester of a semestered school where students had already been reading the timetable and attending classes.

Unit Planning Notes

Before introducing the unit, teachers should try to anticipate what students will need to know about the school. This knowledge differs from school to school. Teachers need to decide, in cooperation with the Guidance department, how best to inform the rest of the staff about who is in the ELDAO program and what their skill levels are. All classroom teachers will need to consider how to begin to help the students meet the content expectations of their subjects.

The spectrum of behaviour in an ELD class may be broader than might be seen in most high school classes. These students may have had little or no school experience and may not be familiar with commonly accepted appropriate school behaviours like classroom routines. They may be unfamiliar with the many instructional strategies practised in Ontario classrooms and they may not have had the opportunity to develop the range of learning styles necessary to deal with these diverse teaching strategies. Some ELD students may seem very passive while others may seem quite the opposite. In addition, behaviours will change as students pass through the various stages of cultural adjustment and literacy development.

Current performance of students must be seen as an indicator of previous school experience and exposure to English, not as an indicator of ability. Some students, especially those with minimal oral fluency, may require additional time to achieve the course expectations and may only begin to acquire English literacy skills after they have started to settle in at school.

Teachers must observe students as they learn new information that is closely linked to what they already know, in a variety of settings, and over a span of time. Teachers may begin to suspect that a student has a learning problem when the student cannot progress in learning something new, even with repeated trials.

All students come to the classroom with valuable life experiences. Teachers will have to build upon the knowledge and skills with which students arrive; they must never criticize the students or make judgments about their past. In all likelihood, once students begin to see how much they have to learn to catch up to their peers, they will become self-conscious, frustrated or anxious. For these students, it is imperative that the classroom be a safe and supportive environment where they will be able to take the kinds of risks necessary to their progress in learning.

Students in the ELDAO class benefit from the security of a classroom in which routines are understood and expectations clearly articulated. In this unit, suggestions will be made about daily classroom practices that are useful.

Students in this course are very far behind their peers in reading facility. They have a lot of "catching-up" to do in this acceleration course. Provide time over the course of the unit for students to use the

computer to reinforce literacy skills. Practice and drill will have to be done each and every day by the student at home to ensure that rapid progress will occur. Teachers need to develop homework activities that reinforce skills and knowledge taught in the classroom. At this stage of reading, repetition is key. Schools need to find innovative ways to involve community members and families to support and assist ELDAO students both inside and outside the classroom.

Many of the students may never have kept the kind of notebook that classroom teachers have come to expect. Early on, students will need to begin to see how the notebook is a reflection of the work done in class. There must be many opportunities given to refer back to previous work and to review work done. Evaluation of the notebook will be critical. As well, students need to be introduced to portfolios. Even at this early stage of literacy development, portfolios offer students a glimpse of the process of writing. Portfolios allow students to see various stages of work in progress and help them begin to recognize quality work. If students work closely with their teachers to develop various forms of portfolio assessment, they will learn to evaluate their own work and the work of others.

At the beginning of the course, it will be critical to introduce short forms of literature on the topic of the alphabet and on orientation to school life. These stories and books should be read as part of the class routine. Teachers may use the stories as springboards for individual lessons or language experience stories. Picture books must be selected with care and introduced tactfully with adolescents. Older students can attend to details and subtle layers of meaning that younger children cannot appreciate.

Teachers will use a variety of teaching strategies with the Experience Chart Stories: read the stories aloud to help enlarge the students' repertoire of sight words; employ a wide range of activities to help students focus on individual sounds and words in different contexts (e.g., teacher written stories using the known words); cover up key words to develop the students' skills in prediction; make up cloze

exercises from the stories to encourage students to gather meaning from context; teach word families to help students establish patterns that will assist them in decoding new words; teach spelling to help students understand that there is a standard way to print a word. For students at this level, experience chart stories are the main texts. Teachers will need to refer back to them many times and use them for reading lessons, spelling activities and oral reading practice.

Students enter our school system throughout the year. Continuous intake implies that orientation will be ongoing. New students will have to be made aware of school rules, routines, and expectations. Students who have been in the class will be able to conduct much of the orientation for newer students. They will be able to explain such details as the workings of the timetable, how and where to purchase equipment, and will be able to give tours of the school. New issues will arise as the year progresses, for example: how to prepare for and write exams, how to choose appropriate courses for the following year and how to sign up for various teams. The teacher should continue to work on orientation throughout the year with more recent arrivals to Canada, as well as with students who have been here since the start of the course to ease the long process of adjustment to school.

The ELDAO teacher needs to work closely with the Home Form teacher and the Teacher Advisor. They should regularly confer about successful strategies that help students adjust, and share observations on students' progress. ELD teachers will want to reinforce skills and knowledge introduced by the Home Form teacher and the Teacher Advisor since students will gain a deeper understanding of these over time.

"Orientation to School Life" is the first unit in the ELDAO course. Therefore, it should be seen as the beginning of a series of ongoing activities that will continue throughout the entire ELD course, regardless of the content of any particular unit. Examples of classroom activities will be given in greater detail at the start of the unit; explanations are less detailed as the unit progresses.

Teaching/Learning Strategies

The following strategies are included in the unit: Discussion, read aloud, graphic organizer (Venn diagram, timetable, map, chart, display of photos, hand print, pictograph, list), cueing systems, games, review, modeling, patterned writing, guided reading, school tour, paired/group work, guest speaker, brainstorm, computer program, prediction, far point/near point copying, picture dictionaries, word cloze, word families, overwrite/underwrite, compare/contrast, tracking, project/student created books, flash cards, portfolio, and teacher observation.

Assessment/Evaluation Techniques

In the first months of the course, it is extremely difficult to evaluate all of the levels of achievement. That being said, much assessment continues to be diagnostic throughout the course because students who have missed school often have different but valuable life experiences that they bring to class.

Activity Type Tool Categories

Activity 1	Diagnostic Summative Formative	Worksheet Worksheet Following School Rules	Communication/knowledge Comm/Knowledge/Application Application/Knowledge
Activity 2	Summative Formative Formative	Agenda Book Timetable Explanation Timetable paragraph	Comm/Knowledge/Application Comm/Knowledge/Application Know, Communication, Application
Activity 3	Summative	School Map	Comm/Appl/Thinking/Knowledge
Activity 4	Summative Formative	Modified Cloze Reading Skills	Comm/Knowledge/Thinking Communication
Activity 5	Summative	Name Card/Hand Picture	Comm/Knowledge/Thinking
Activity 6	Summative	Picture Dictionary	Comm/Thinking/Knowledge
Activity 7	Summative	Chart	Knowledge/Thinking
Activity 8	Formative Summative	Making Booklet Booklet	Comm/App/Knowledge/Think Comm/App/Knowledge/Think

Course expectations which are assessed through the assessment tools for each activity are denoted by the iconic symbol < in the expectations lists for each activity.

Resources

Teachers will need to have a full range of consumable supplies in the classroom. Some students may require the kinds of supplies that are typically found in elementary classrooms. If fine motor skills are

underdeveloped, provide appropriate writing implements and lined notebooks to assist in letter formation. Word processing programs will be of great assistance to students whose handwriting is difficult to read. Students may need to learn how to cut and glue.

Activity #1: Personal Information

Time: 120 minutes

Description

This is an ongoing activity that will be started at the beginning of the unit. Students will learn to communicate their personal information and will develop proficiency in identifying categories of personal information. In addition they will learn the full name and address of the school.

Strands & Expectations

Oral and Visual Communication: AORV.01L*, AORV.02L; AOR1.02L, AOR1.03L,

A0R1.04L*, AOR1.05L

Reading: AREV.01L, AREV.02L, AREV.03L; ARE1.03L, ARE1.05L, ARE2.04L

Writing: AWRV.01L*; AWR1.01L*, AWR1.02L

Social and Cultural Competence: ASCV.02L*; ASC2.05L*, ASC2.06L, ASC2.08L

Planning Notes

• The teacher will need to have completed the index card with all the student's information on it.

• There are many commercially prepared materials to teach printing and handwriting once previous language knowledge of students has been determined. All students in the class will need instruction on printing and cursive writing.

• Begin to collect business cards from local businesses and from school personnel.

• Materials Needed: Index cards, experience chart paper, markers, multiple copies of teacher prepared worksheet, business cards.

Teaching/Learning Strategies

1. Provide a brief opportunity for teacher and teacher’s introductions

2. Provide each student with a completed index card that has the student’s name, student’s number, home phone, address, city, postal code, province and birthday on it. Review with students multiple titles for information e.g,. given name is the same as first name; last name, family name, and surname are all the same. Introduce the notion of middle name as well as initials. Students should keep these index cards in their pockets. They will need the information on these cards for other classes and for everyday experiences that will require their identification.

Discuss in which everyday situations personal information should be shared and in which situations personal information should not be shared. Include a category for situations that are not clear-cut, and discuss factors that students would need to consider in such situations. Record students' answers in a Venn Diagram.

3. Distribute a worksheet that has the same categories of information as those on the index cards. Have students copy the information they are able to onto the worksheet. Use their responses as a diagnostic evaluation tool to determine familiarity with print and with numbers. Model for students how English writing runs from left to right and top to bottom.

Use the worksheet many times in a variety of ways to reinforce reading and writing skills. Some examples of activities based on the worksheet are: say the names of each of the categories to the students. Have them circle the category name on their sheet, then say aloud the information that they know and feel comfortable repeating in front of the class. (For example, some students may not want to repeat their phone number or address, in front of the class.) Mix up the order of the categories as you say them and ask students to point to the category that you called out. As they learn more about print, ask them to find a word on the sheet that begins with a particular letter.

Over the next few weeks of the unit, students should be able to complete at least parts of the worksheet from memory.

Later in the unit, add the name and complete address of the school.

4. Another day, hand out various business cards. In pairs, students ask their partner for various kinds of information printed on the card, like first name, last name, initial, etc. from the card they have. If you have multiple copies of different business cards, students could play a form of "Go Fish" with the cards.

5. Begin to teach handwriting. Handwriting instruction will need to continue throughout the unit.

Determine level of familiarity with numbers by checking which of the numbers the students can read. Over the course of the unit, ensure that students can recognize the numbers from 1 to 100. Introduce the spellings of numbers from 1-20. Devise a series of games to be played over the next few weeks that review the sequence of numbers and the names of the numbers.

Assessment/Evaluation Techniques

1. Observation of handwriting, knowledge of numbers and word recognition of numbers from 1-100 (Diagnostic)

2. Completed Personal Information Worksheet (Summative)

3. Ongoing teacher observation of the extent to which the student is learning and following basic school routines (Formative)

Accommodations/Special Needs

Students will use the index card with all their information only as long as is necessary. Some may require it for only a short time, while others may continue to use it even at the end of the unit. Pre-verbal ESL students will benefit from observing the classroom routines even though they are unable to participate at the same level as other students. They will begin to understand routines and behaviours and witness the model of literacy activities directed by the teacher. It will be appropriate, at certain times, to pair students with partners who speak the same first language.

Activity #2: School Tools: Introduction to the Student Agenda Book and the Timetable

Time: 180 minutes

Description

Students will use the Student Agenda book, begin to understand and follow their timetables, and obtain a lock and locker. These activities form the beginnings of the traditional school orientation process and serve to prepare students for the tour of the school. (See Activity #3)

Strands & Expectations

Oral and Visual Communication: AORV.02L*; AOR1.02L, AOR1.03L, AOR1.04L*

Reading: AREV.01L, AREV.02L; ARE1.03L, ARE1.05L, ARE2.03L, ARE2.04L, ARE2.05L

Writing: AWRV.01L*, AWRV.02L; AWR1.01L*, AWR1.02L, AWR2.01L, AWR2.02L*

Social and Cultural Competence: ASCV.02L; ASC2.03L, ASC2.04L, ASC2.05L, ASC2.07L

Planning Notes

• Get a copy of each student's timetable and keep it in a binder in the classroom. Place a copy of your timetable in the binder as well. This binder is for the teacher’s use only.

• Many of the pages of the Agenda book will be overwhelming to the students until they are beginning to read. Adaptations and modifications will need to be made to help them deal with the information contained in it.

• Materials Needed: Experience chart paper and markers, glue, stapler, scissors, a copy of the Student Agenda book to use as a teacher's reference, multiple copies of blank timetables. If your school does not use Agenda books, you will need to have multiple copies of a workbook that will be used in the place of the Agenda book.

Prior Learning

• Familiarity with personal information forms

Teaching/Learning Strategies

1. Introduce the Student Agenda book. If your school does not have one, then create one for each student using a notebook. Point out to students the top and bottom and front and back of the book.

Have students copy their names and addresses onto the first page of the Agenda book. Use their ability in copying this and all other preliminary activities as a diagnostic tool as a basis for determining the extent of their prior exposure to print.

Review the days of the week and the months of the year. Over the next few weeks consolidate this content using a variety of matching games and activities.

Draw attention to the calendar in the Agenda book and to any lists of special days or activities in both the school and community.

Show students where the map of the school and other critical pages are located in the book.

2. Ask students to look at their timetables. Show them where on the page they can find their personal information, and have them match this information to the information on their index cards. If the information does not match or if there are errors in the information, determine the correct information and notify the office.

See if any of the students can tell you the numbers on the page. Many students may have had more experience with numbers than letters.

Show students how the timetable of your school works. Ensure that students glue or staple a copy of their timetable in their Agenda book so that others can direct them to their classes until they are able to read the timetable themselves. Try to find common classrooms in the students' timetables. Your timetable master binder will be helpful here.

Share your timetable with the students. On experience chart paper, model sentences about your own timetable. Vary the way you present information about when you are in your classroom. Use phrases like Period 1, Then at 10:00, Day 4, and so on. Read the sentences out to the class. Model the directionality of print. Circle or highlight key time phrases and words. Provide students with a blank timetable and ask them to record your timetable onto the blank, using the information in the paragraphs.

On Experience chart paper, prepare sentences based on your model for students to complete using the information from their own timetables.</