Math and Literacy

Math skills are important to a child's success – both at school and in everyday life. Understanding math also builds confidence and opens the door to a range of career options.

In our everyday lives, understanding math enables us to:

• manage time and money, and handle everyday situations that involve numbers (for example, calculate how much time we need to get to work, how much food we need in order to feed our families, and how much money that food will cost);
• understand patterns in the world around us and make predictions based on patterns (for example, predict traffic patterns to decide on the best time to travel);
• solve problems and make sound decisions;
• explain how we solved a problem and why we made a particular decision;
• use technology (for example, calculators and computers) to help solve problems.

The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1–8: Language, 2023  is grounded in the belief that all students can succeed when they develop knowledge and skills in language and literacy. Strong foundational knowledge and skills in both oral and written language are necessary to support more complex skills such as critical thinking and problem solving.

The Ahkwesáhsne Board of Education prioritizes creating a strong foundation for student achievement through literacy and provides a variety of support, resources and assistance for educators, students and families.

The revised curriculum describes the knowledge and skills that students are expected to learn. It is organized in four distinct but interrelated areas: 

1. Literacy connections and applications, 

2. Foundations of language, 

3. Comprehension: Understanding and responding to texts, 

4. Composition: Expressing ideas and creating texts with language and literacy skills being taught and assessed throughout all areas of learning. 

Additionally, this curriculum emphasizes evidence-based systematic and explicit instruction of foundational knowledge and skills, including oral language (including phonological awareness) , word-level reading and spelling (phonics), vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.

Structured literacy is an evidence-based approach to systematically and explicitly teaching

• phonemic awareness, 

• phonics, (word reading and spelling)

• fluency, 

• vocabulary, 

• listening and reading comprehension, and 

• written expression.

These skills, however, do not exist in isolation and students will develop them simultaneously, with an understanding of how the skills are connected. This interconnectedness is reflective to the changes found in the report card where there is now one mark given for language. 

AMBE resources and programs supportive of evidence-based systematic and explicit instruction of foundational knowledge and skills include:

• Early Intervention Educators

• Differentiating Instruction for Students with Special Education Needs

• Special Education AMBE resource

• Equity, Diversity and Inclusion AMBE resource

• Indigenous Education AMBE resource

A guide for parents is a thought provoking resource that provides ideas and considerations for supporting readers in their home environment. This guide offers parents information about how the curriculum was developed, what students will learn by grade and what the learning focus of each strand is and how they interconnect with each other. Additionally, the “support your child’s learning” tab offers suggestions for how to encourage, participate and promote literacy in your home with easy to implement ideas that can be tailored to support a child of any age.

Below is a list of ideas that can support students of any age:

• Keep reading with your child. Read a variety of material – magazines, e-books, poems and comic books

• Tap into their interests and hobbies – children are more likely to explore what they are interested in.

• Read some of the same books and materials as your child, so you can talk about characters, stories and topics together.

• Find fun and meaningful opportunities for children to write, or for you to write together. Some examples: create greeting cards, shopping lists, party invitations, gratitude notes, posters, records of special events, and so on.

Beginning readers:

• Encourage the reader to attend to the letters in the word, scanning from left to right and identifying the sounds they know

• Encourage the reader to be flexible and consider other sounds that letter or letter pattern makes

• When sounding words out, the reader may benefit from reminders to hold sounds that can be sustained (e.g /m/) to blend to the next sound. When a reader pauses between each sound, /m/ — /a/— /t/, it can be difficult for some readers to distinguish the word they just sounded out

• Support the reader with words the reader does not know the sounds of and irregular words they have not been taught. The goal is to avoid reinforcing guessing as a helpful strategy for tackling unknown words

• Talk about new words and discuss their meanings

• Take breaks with longer texts and discuss the reader’s understanding of what they have read

• Identify and discuss if a word changes when parts are added to the beginning of the word (prefix) or the end of the word (suffix). These word parts have meaning and can change the meaning and pronunciation of words.

More experienced readers:

• There will be additional opportunities with multisyllabic words to discuss the meaningful word parts and how they can support the reader when faced with an unfamiliar word. For example, “I am not sure what metamorphic rock is, but I do know that “morph” means to change. I think that can help me.”

• Encourage the reader to think critically about what they are reading. Ask questions that promote the reflection of questions like, whose voice is represented? who is representing these voices? whose voice is missing?

The Ontario Language Curriculum 2023