Honouring Residential School Survivors

Fall is definitely here with the crisp morning air and sounds of Canadian geese making their way South.
We are really starting to settle into a nice routine in East 109. This week,  we had a very heavy focus on
reading with Monday being Orange Shirt Day, a day created to honour and pay respect to all children,
families, and communities who were devastated by government-enforced, church-run residential schools. 

Reading

Students continue to do a great job of signing up for conferences when they need to chat about their
individualized reading response assignments and I have received some really great finished work. We
talked about what they need to do to successfully respond to any text in writing and then they put it into
action in their responses to I Am Not A Number by Jenny Kay Dupuis and Kathy Kacer and
The Secret Path by Gord Downie. We spent some time learning the skill of making a comparison
between two texts and reviewed the skill of finding the theme in literary texts.

Students worked on making comparisons of literary texts.

Writing

We have continued to work on the skill of idea generation this week. We also worked on reading like
writers as we examined Sarah Kay’s poem “Hands”. Students worked to identify the Smiley-Faced tricks
that she used in her writing. We also made connections to idea generation and improvisation in Drama.
We played the game Who, What, Where which had students quickly thinking on their feet to create short
skits.

Generation ideas through improve.

Media Literacy

The Secret Path animation is a beautiful example of a digital text. We looked at how the original graphic
text was transformed into a moving animation. We also continued to work on our sketchnoting skills this
week and I am so impressed with the attention to detail that is going into their work. I love to see the
creativity blossom in these amazing kiddos! https://www.secretpath.ca/

Oral Communication

Students worked on their listening skills as we watched The Secret Path and Sarah Kay’s performance of her poem “Hands”.  We had some deep classroom discussions this week and it was great to see how they listened to one another and built on each other’s ideas as we talked about the residential schools that indigenous children were forced to endure.