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ELA Today

ELA Today is an online journal compiled and edited by the ATEQ Board featuring content relevant to English Language Arts Teachers in Quebec. It includes contributions from people in Quebec and from abroad in order to foster beneficial dialogue and share information, knowledge and pedagogical approaches.

Below are excerpts from ELA Today. Click on an excerpt to read the full article. Access to ELA Today articles is exclusive to ATEQ Members – make sure you are logged in to access content, or become a member if you aren’t one already!

Taking Talk out of the Classroom

    The Work Oriented Training Path (WOTP) program is designed to help prepare students for life outside of the classroom. It also has an academic component which needs to be evaluated. As usual, reading and production tasks came naturally to me and were completed with success, but when it came to talk I was at a loss. How do I prepare students for conversations outside of the classroom, inside the classroom? This is what inspired the “Coffee Klatch”. Approximately once a week, we gather around tables and we talk. There are no prompts, assigned topics, assigned seats, or technology of any kind; we simply re-create what the typical break room would look like, and practice the art of conversation.

    Five Reasons to Teach Horror

      The world is a scary place. War, racism, nukes… Trump! So why teach horror? Why challenge students to think about, and confront the dark parts of our humanity? Why dwell on that which hides in the shadows and the monstrous? Here are five reasons why you should explore the ghost with the most, groovy ghouls and creepy crawlers in your curriculum.

      After the Fall

        Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. We have all heard the echo of finality in this cautionary nursery rhyme. Some of us still have trouble getting past the image of the king’s horses (of course…with their delicate hooves!). And then there’s the king’s men jockeying for position and failing to put Humpty together again. Poor Humpty. But Dan Santat imagined that there was more. Humpty somehow gets the help he needs and, with bandages on his cracked shell and insecurity lines on his brow, strives to find his mojo and get back up.

        Stop Motion Animation

          While searching for resources online about using picture books in the secondary classroom, I came across another teacher’s YouTube playlist of stop-motion animation films that his students made from picture books. I watched nearly all of the short films they made and was inspired! These kids clearly called on several skills and were able to put together some pretty amazing productions.

          Breakout

            The fictional Wolf Creek is a tight-knit Adirondack mountain community that serves a maximum security prison. Kate Messner’s latest novel is based on the 2015 prison breakout where two inmates escaped The Clinton County Correctional Facility and attempted to make their way to Canada. The narrative is accessible to many readers because of the variety of text types. The book is sometimes funny and at other times serious, but it is always engaging since the voices of the young people of Wolf Creek tell a story that is very much close to home.

            From Hoaxes to Human Books

              Librarians and ELA teachers from the English Montreal School Board frequently collaborate to create initiatives that engage students and boost ELA competencies. Here are a few examples from the 2017-18 school year: Summer Reading Podcasts, Human Library, ​Fake News Detection, Le Combat des Livres NDG Reads.

              Animated Shorts

                Who doesn’t love a good animated short film? They’re creative, thoughtful and – like a last-minute snow day in February – they can serve as a nice brain break. They’re also perfect for the ELA classroom. For starters, students are already comfortable with the medium of film. Most teens spend at least some of their free time (binge) watching Netflix or playing narrative-based online games. Because of this familiarity, students are more likely to feel a sense of security from film that they may not get from non-visual texts like novels or poetry. And, feeling at ease is the first step to engagement. We’ve put together a list of our favourite short animations for you to use in your ELA classroom. While the list was created with a secondary audience in mind, many of the films are appropriate for students in elementary. With each film, we’ve included a short synopsis as well as three possible discussion questions for students. See LIST compiled by P. Bussey.

                Readers and Diverse Books

                  Trying to find books that tell the stories that reflect the experiences of the diverse readers in our classroom can be a real challenge, one that members of the “We Need Diverse Books” campaign know only too well. Spearheaded by author Ellen Oh, in 2014, this organization began as the social media campaign #WeNeedDiverseBooks. What began as a response to both the lack of diversity in the programming and the presenters featured at major publishing conventions in the United States has grown into a larger movement to bring diverse books into the mainstream. Here, Lise Kuhn shares information about diversity in children’s and young adult books and discusses the advantages of including diverse texts in the classroom.

                  Texts for R-W connection

                    These texts have been recommended for use as models for drawing, writing and producing texts. They can also serve as texts to for the response process and for literature circles discussions. See the LIST.
                    Image source: www.laurahandler.com

                    Go to www.quebecreadingconnection.qc.ca to discover more texts for the ELA and SELA classroom.

                    Reading Solar Bones

                      The author, Abigail Anderson, had a career in education that spanned thirty-six years, from the classroom to the Quebec Ministry of Education and McGill University. She remains a passionate reader and proponent of teachers, ELA, and public education. As a literate person, she was unexpectedly confronted with reading a novel that challenged her repertoire, her knowledge and expectations of craft and genre, as well as her understanding of herself as a reader. After a lifetime of thinking, writing and teaching about reading, imagine what a gift it is for a reading experience to so surprise a reader — and for that same reader to allow themselves to be surprised. Follow Abigail’s reading adventure HERE.