Family Literacy Week

          Every year, ABC Life Literacy Canada hosts a Family Literacy Day to help recognize the importance literacy has on everyone.  As teachers, we feel strongly about supporting such activities in order to show our students, through example, how literacy can impact our lives.

          To help the students at Provost Public School celebrate this annual event, the kids and some teachers dressed up like their favourite storybook characters.  to continue the literacy activities, I created an Emaze presentation using some of the statistics of literacy rates around the world, specifically providing information on women illiteracy rates around the globe.  We sometimes take this information for granted, however when you take a moment to read them, you might be astounded by the staggering numbers.  North America and Europe has worked very hard to teach literacy to all socio-economic groups, however there are still 750 million adults worldwide who remain illiterate. ¹

          Using our Panther Groups, the students went to their leaders classroom and went through the presentation and read a story called "Zak the Yak With Books on His Back".  There is a page in the presentation with links to purchase the book.

           After completing the presentation, students were paired off and worked in their group to play a game of Kahoots.  This exciting game asked questions about the story we read and on information learned about literacy.


Two students working as a team to answer the questions in Kahoots.



Pete the Cat came for a visit in the grade 3 classroom.


My grade 5 students donning their costumes of their favourite storybook characters.

1.  Literacy Rates Continue to Rise from One Generation to the Next [PDF]. (n.d.). UNESCO.

Helping in Our Community

       Each year, +Classroom Champions have their Olympic Athlete Mentors create a video on the topic of Community.  This is one of my favourite topics of all.  The old adage "it takes a village to raise a child", is so true, especially in this day and age with technology and the ability to connect with others around the world.  In our global community, our youth need to learn the skills to work in this environment and as Scott Tupper says in his video found below, "we are part of multiple communities...their are multiple ways to play a positive role in your community."

Scott Tupper: Community from Classroom Champions on Vimeo.

       For the second year, the grade 2 Southoff, 4 Clarke-Rennie and my grade 8 Health students, we worked on making No-Sew Blankets that would be donated to the Linus Project Alberta and Victim Services in the Provost area.  These blankets will then be given to people who have recently gone through a traumatic experience.

       The process started with a wonderful shopping spree at one of my favourite kinds of stores; a fabric store.

After purchasing 28 pieces of fabric that were 1.5 yards  long (bolt width), we matched the front and backs together with the coordinating fabric.  We even had four ladies from our community come in and help us with the cutting and squaring off.









Next we layered the pieces and cut of any edges

that were not square.












Once the edges were square the grade 8 students were able to cut 4" squares out of each corner and then add 1" x 4" fringes along the side.  These fringes had to go through both layers at the same time to prevent the sizes of the fringes from being different when you tied each set of fringe together.  This is something we learned from our experience last year.

When we finally finished the cutting, we put the blankets away until it was time to tie the fringes together.

With grade 2S, 4CR and my Health students, we spent a couple of classes tying the blankets together.  This gave the grade 8 students the chance to be positive roll models for the younger students as they taught everyone how to tie the blankets.

To showcase our talets, I have created a Prezi of the finished product.  You may recognize the rhyming pattern as 'Twas the Night Before Christmas.  The kids seemed to get a great kick out of watching seeing their task put to a rhyme....I think they felt quite pleased they had accomplished so much to help so many people, even if they would never meet the people who would receive these gifts.