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The children of Ontario get a chance every year to vote for their favourite Canadian picture book from the Ontario Library Association’s list of nominees. Some of my most beloved books are from this category and as a teacher I’ve used them countless times. The two books featured in this blog both demonstrate the fantastic imaginations of writers and illustrators. Plus, these books both feature humour as a literary device to make these stories unforgettable.

The Boy Who Loved Bananas by George Elliott; illustrated by Andrej Krystoforski
2006 Winner of the Blue Spruce Award

Matthew loves the monkeys at the Metro Zoo so he decides to be like them and only eat bananas. Suddenly he feels an itchy sensation and he turns into a monkey. His parents try all kinds of interventions but everyone says Matthew will stop being a monkey when he wants to stop. He gets up to many types of mischief while he is a monkey, including influencing all the kids at school to eat bananas. The principal joins the trend too! The story ends with Matthew switching to peanuts and he is pictured sitting at his desk in his classroom as an elephant!

This book is a terrific story starter for shared, partner or independent writing. To analyse the writing style we realize that the story can be broken down into parts:
*The main character is introduced and is shown to love the animal he is going to turn into;
*The reader must suspend their disbelief and accept that the main character “transmogrifies” into an animal;
*The main character visits many practitioners but cannot be cured;
*The parents learn to accept their child the way he is;
*Just when we think he will become human again, the main character changes into something else that he likes.

Using The Boy Who Loved Bananas as an example we can emphasize that there is no harmful violence in the story. The type of humour is quite silly and uses exaggeration such as Matthew climbing the flag pole or the principal eating bananas under his desk. When students are creating their own story, they can also use exaggeration to add humour to their ideas.

It is possible to go a step further and have students add detailed illustrations to their work. Look carefully through the original book and notice how the other characters’ facial expressions show their reaction to what is happening.
Having students create books with illustrations is a terrific project. It helps them understand the publishing process and they end up with a wonderful creation. The stories could be put on display in the class library so that they can read each other’s work. I have found that when we send these books home, many families treasure a book created by their child.


If Kids Ruled the World by Linda Bailey; illustrated by David Huyck
2016 Winner of the Blue Spruce Award

Similarly, If Kids Ruled the World asks us to suspend our disbelief and imagine the world with children in charge. The story stresses the fun and silly antics that would occur in this situation and as you can imagine, kids absolutely love it. The illustrations add a tremendous amount of humour to the story as we see multiple characters on each page acting out everything from unusual pets like giraffes and ostriches to bubble fun in a swimming pool to a trampoline sidewalk.
This story would make a wonderful lead up to an art lesson where each student illustrates their answer to the question: What funny things could happen if kids ruled the world? Assembling all their work into one class book makes a very popular item in the class library.

Both of these books can be adapted easily for K-3. Depending on your students, you could use these stories with older students too. I have had success partnering with older students to create picture books as an assignment. These books are perfect examples to demonstrate how to use your imagination and humour to create a hilarious and unforgettable story.

Happy Reading, Writing and Drawing!
Brenda

As we move towards the winter holiday season, it is natural to discuss the different holidays we all celebrate. As an educator who works in culturally and linguistically diverse communities, I often question myself: how do I honor students’ identities and be inclusive during this season?

I feel that the distrinction between learning and celebrating holidays is key.

Learning about holidays positions it as a place of inquiry. Students explore traditions, stories, and histories without being asked to participate in practices unauthentically. This shift supports equity and belonging.

What it can look like? Here are some suggestions I have personally used:

• Reading diverse texts: Allow students to form connections to their own experiences (encourage critical thinking)
• Centering Student Voices: Students may want to share how they recognize a holiday. This optionality keeps students from feeling put on the spot or singled out as cultural representatives.
• Curriculum Connections: It aligns wells with Social Studies (identity, community, traditions, citizenship), Literacy (informational texts, narratives, speaking and listening) and The Arts (appreciating—not performing—cultural practices)
• Ask “What have you learned about this tradition?” instead of “How do you celebrate?
• Collaborate with Families: Share your approach with families understand that the classroom is learning-focused and give them the chance to share if they feel comfortable
• Reflect Regularly: Ask yourself, “Whose traditions are being centred? Whose are missing? Are all students able to engage comfortably?”

Moving from celebration to learning isn’t about removing joy; it’s about widening the circle of belonging. When students see that their teacher approaches holidays with curiosity, care, and humility, they feel safe, respected, and represented.

At the beginning of the school year, I ease my working mom anxiety by watching a lot of videos about quick after school dinner recipes.  While there are hundreds of things to worry about related to teaching every day, somehow this makes me feel better and more prepared to tackle these sometimes exhausting fall beginnings every year.  

I start out looking at the main ingredients required, the measurements so I will know how much to purchase and whether it’s simple enough for me to figure out on my own.  As I watch the video and see the cooking techniques and instructions, it starts to make sense to me.  I can imagine the textures, the tastes – even see how many pots and pans I’ll have to clean after dinner.  These videos are entertaining and also help me to gain confidence in trying new flavours or learn how to tweak my tried and true recipes. 

My favourite phrase is when the creator gives permission to “measure with your heart”.  This small four word sentence honours that everyone’s tastes may differ; your family may like a little less salt and a little more garlic, or might prefer maple syrup over honey for a sweetener.  The small tweaks personalize that recipe and help me to make it my own.  When I measure with my heart, I think about who I am cooking for; family, friends, or even just myself and that recipe becomes customized with them in mind. 

When I get the opportunity to meet students in these early fall days, I’m still following some of those tried and true ‘recipes’ at the beginning of the school year – lots of smiles, spending time getting to know each other, building a community together.  I work my way through the measurements – assessments that help me to learn more about their academic experiences and how I can best meet their needs as their teacher.  

But somehow, without my noticing, I start to measure with my heart.  I see all the unique qualities and personality traits of the students and they start to learn a little more about me, too.  Some may need a little more gentle encouragement and others like to laugh and joke around with me. I learn who has siblings and who has a hamster and who takes swimming lessons on the weekend. I ask about these experiences that are important to them – personalizing the way that we show care for one another.  Maybe it’s suggesting books that centre their identities in language class; maybe it’s using real life examples that help them feel seen in math class.  Just like cooking, when I measure with my heart I think about who I am teaching – not just as students, but as children who are brilliantly unique and gently adjust the flavour of our classroom with them in mind. 

As we move into the unending deadlines that always seem to be present in education, I’m going to remind myself to measure from the heart every day.  To think not just about what students need to learn, but the ways our classroom can best reflect how they need to learn.  Perhaps it’s a  little more scaffolding at times or a more hands-on experience in other subjects.  Maybe Monday needs to be a little sweeter than the other days while Friday needs to be more spicy and bolder.  There’s no recipe that can guarantee what we will need most each week;  I’m just going to measure with my heart.

Those of you who have had the privilege of being ESL teachers will know the look I am about to describe.  It’s the expression on students’ faces when you arrive at the classroom door to collect them for tutorial support, their smiles lighting up the room as they realize it’s their turn to go with you. Other times you might notice a jump in energy when you walk in, as students suddenly rush to grab their pencils and head over in enthusiastic anticipation. Yes, ESL support classes can create an incomparably safe, fun, and dynamic environment full of rich learning. It’s a smaller space, quieter … where a few familiar students and a dedicated, specialized teacher provide the extra scaffolding, time, and support new students may need to find their footing and continue to learn.

It goes without saying that many multilingual language learners appreciate and look forward to these welcoming and affirming tutorial programs.

But …

But.

Not all students do.

Those of you who have been ESL teachers will also be familiar with a different look, I think. Sometimes, it is an older student who looks a bit embarrassed, not wanting to be singled out in front of peers as needing “help”; sometimes it is a student who is passionate about the next lesson topic, and looks frustrated and disappointed they will miss it; other times the student is unmistakably crestfallen, having worked tirelessly on their art project or science demonstration, only to find they will not be present for the first part of the class presentations on it; one of the worst is a quiet look of sadness, the student’s desire to stay with their friends seeming to hang in the air in front of you, everything about their expression telling you they just want to stay and participate in everything their peers are doing.

Make no mistake, these looks are not the result of subpar teaching or lackluster ESL learning programs; on the contrary, ESL teachers are some of the most talented and knowledgeable educators among our ranks. It is simply a part of that undeniable truth, that students have unique and varying learning needs, and that while some may appreciate and benefit from tutorial instruction in the traditional sense, others need something else. They want to stay and be included in their learning community in the classroom, be the same as their friends, and learn English and curriculum in the process.

In my last blog entry First, then, I described some of the potential academic pitfalls of isolated ESL tutorial instruction, where educators teach separate programs with little to no communication and collaboration. In such isolated models, students may not have as many opportunities for scaffolded support and recycling of key language structures needed in the mainstream classroom, potentially resulting in reduced linguistic development and curriculum access. However, academics are not the only consideration in this scenario. The innate desire we all have as humans to contribute and be included is equally important. And in decades’ past, when ESL support models overwhelming defaulted to isolated tutorial support, we may have met the needs of some students … but not all.

Implicit in a model that requires students to learn English as a separate subject before they are able to participate in classroom lessons is the assumption that students do not have the ability to participate as they are, here and now. That their current linguistic repertories are irrelevant to learning. That their rich experiences and skills do not count in school. That they are not enough. 

Fortunately, today’s ESL teachers are no longer relegated to isolated islands of instruction; classroom teachers and ESL teachers can now actively collaborate with one another to ensure MLLs are included in daily instruction, and have access to a full and robust curriculum, with the language supports they need to do so. To accomplish this, some educators co-teach in the same classroom, ensuring MLLs can stay with their peers and continue learning English; some teach separately but communicate with one another, so that their language programs are aligned and mutually-reinforcing.

All of this is well and good if – if – proper supports for educators are in place, with students’ needs centred. And regardless of support model used – tutorial, or integrated, or some wonderful combination of the two –  the professional judgement of teachers, coupled with adequate funding and teaching staff, are critical to choosing, creating, and sustaining responsive learning programs for students.

I will not repeat the myriad of ways collaborative, inclusive teaching models can be accomplished. I will however offer the link again, to ETFO’s infographic quick guide “Collaboration and Co-teaching for MLLs” as well as additional infographics in the same series, “Translanguaging” and “Program Adaptations”, which detail how students’ first languages and background knowledge can be included and affirmed in the classroom, and used for rich curriculum learning. ETFO Secure – Supporting English Language Learners Resources

Wishing you the best of luck in re-imagining your classroom environments, in which all students’ identities, knowledge, and languages provide bright paths to learning. Where they are more than enough … right here, right now.

This year, a part of my roles is serving as a Kindergarten Planning Time teacher. It’s a unique position, one where I drift between classrooms, slipping into the children’s day like a background melody. I’m not their “main” teacher, yet I’m a constant presence. And over the months, I’ve realized something powerful.

We talk so much about academics, routines, and expectations, but underneath all of it is something deeper. That is, what children come to believe about themselves, their inner voice. The one that will one day whisper encouragement before a big test, calm them when they are overwhelmed, or remind them that they are capable and loved.

Since September, I’ve watched a quiet transformation. When I enter a classroom now, the children greet me with familiarity, comfort, and joy. They know me. They trust me. Many of them open up in ways they didn’t at the start of the year.

It made me realize:

Even in a short period of time, even in a shared role, even in just one period a day, we matter.

Our tone, our consistency, our reactions, our presence… all of it becomes part of a child’s internal narrative.

There’s one moment that has stayed with me this year, one I think about often.

In September, every time I walked into one particular Kindergarten class at the end of the day, one little girl started to cry. It wasn’t about me; it was about the clock. My appearance signaled one thing to her:

It’s almost home time.

And for her, that transition felt overwhelming.

Every day, she cried.

Not loudly, not dramatically, just an overwhelming feeling that sat in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks.

I sat with her. I talked to her. I told her she was safe, that she was okay, that she was brave. In the beginning, she would repeat it back to me as a question.

I didn’t push her. I just showed up consistently with the same calm voice, and gave her the same gentle reassurance.

And slowly, so slowly at first, her inner voice began to change.

Where there was once panic, she started to build predictability.

Where there was fear, she began to find comfort.

Where there were tears, she began to show quiet strength.

Now, months later, she no longer cries when I walk in. Instead, she greets me, accepts that it’s almost home time. She gets ready calmly. She smiles. She chats. She knows she’s okay. She knows she’s brave.

And somewhere inside her, a new inner voice has formed. A voice that sounds a little bit like her… and maybe just a little bit like the reassurance she heard from me all those times.

“This is routine. I can handle this. I’m brave.”

This experience reminded me that how we greet a child becomes how they learn to greet themselves.

How we respond to their fear becomes how they learn to handle fear.

How we speak to them becomes their self-talk when we are not around.

We are not just teaching curriculum.

We are teaching self-regulation. Resilience. Self-talk.

We shape their inner voice, one moment, one connection at a time. And sometimes, it’s the smallest roles, the smallest windows of time, that make the biggest impact.

This is the first of three posts where I’ll share my work towards supporting the students I teach in becoming more confident and competent readers and writers. In this post, I’ll focus on how I’m helping students in grades 7 and 8 develop their writing skills by explicitly teaching them how to identify and construct the four sentence types (declarative, imperative, interrogative, and exclamatory) and the four sentence forms (simple, compound, complex, and compound complex) listed in specific expectation B3.1 found in the revised Grades 1 – 8 Language curriculum (2023).

While I am aware, according to the revised Language curriculum, students in intermediate grades 7 and 8 should have a clear knowledge and understanding of sentence forms and types from their previous schooling experiences, my assessments have revealed otherwise. Meaning, while many of the students with whom I work can compose sentences, when I asked them to identify the sentence form or type of sentence they composed, they said that they didn’t know what I meant or they just looked at me with blank stares.

To ensure my language program responds to student learning needs, I’ve incorporated a foundations of literacy component to my program where I explicitly teach students about sentence forms, sentence types, syntax, grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and other foundational literacy knowledge and skills. I began with sentences because I understand them to be one of the essential components of writing that students in intermediate grades need to firmly grasp as they start to engage in longer more complex forms of writing. I also began with sentences because I recognized that I could explicitly teach students about syntax, grammar, capitalization and other foundational literacy knowledge and skills while doing sentence work. I arrived at these insights after reading several books on how to teach students to write, one of them being, The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subject Areas, by Judith C. Hochman and Natalie Wexler. In it the authors write,

“The importance of spending plenty of instructional time working with sentences can’t be stressed enough. Sentence-level work is the engine that will propel your students from writing the way they speak to using structures of written language. Once they begin to construct more sophisticated sentences, they’ll enhance not only their writing skills but also their reading comprehension. And sentence-level work will lay the groundwork for your students’ ability to revise and edit when they tackle longer forms of writing.”

In preparation for my lessons, I thought about a scope and sequence that would move students from simple to more complex sentence concepts and incorporated the gradual release of responsibility model to slowly transfer the cognitive load from teacher to students to support their success. Recognizing sentence types to be an easier entry point than sentence forms, I began with the four sentence types then moved on to teaching the four sentence forms. When I taught the four sentence forms, I taught them in order from easiest (simple and compound) to more challenging (complex and compound complex).

Here is a brief lesson outline that I used and found positively impacted student learning. I began this lesson by sharing the learning goal and success criteria with students to inform them of what they were learning, why they were learning it, and how they would know when they had been successful in their learning. Here is the learning goal and success criteria I shared with students. Learning Goal: I am learning to create simple declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory sentences to develop my ability to use a variety of sentence types when I write. Success Criteria: I can compose a declarative sentence, an interrogative sentence, an imperative sentence, and an exclamatory sentence. After sharing the learning goal, I then explained that we were studying sentences to help them better organize and communicate their ideas in written form and support their reading comprehension skills.

Next, I had students engage in a hands-on activity to add a kinaesthetic component to the lesson to promote movement and conversation. As a minds on for the introductory lesson to the four sentence types, I placed students in groups of 3 or 4 then had them participate in a matching activity where they matched each sentence type with the meaning/definition and examples. See an image of the activity below. Once students completed their matches and I had verified that they were correct, I had them record the sentence type and meaning/definition in their language notebooks for future reference.

When most students had completed the matching activity and recorded the information I requested in their notebooks, I debriefed the activity by having them share their matches. I then explained and modeled when to use each of the four sentence types as an opportunity to review the concept, reinforce understanding, and provide some explicit instruction. For example, to review I asked students to share a definition of a declarative sentence. Listening for the response, a declarative sentence can be a fact, opinion, explanation, or observation. Then, to reinforce their understanding, I said, “when do we use declarative sentences?” Listening for the response, “Writers use declarative sentences to share a fact or facts, an opinion or opinions, provide an explanation or explanations, or share an observation or observations”. Then to provide some explicit instruction, I modeled the creation of each of the four sentence types and co-construction one of each with students before having them work in small groups to create their own examples which I had them record in their notebooks.

The next day, to further review and expose students to the four sentence types, I found a passage from a short story we had read to provide an example of how an author employs the four sentence types in their writing.

After weeks of sentence level work, I administered a quiz to measure my instructional impact on student learning. The assessment revealed that most if not all students fell into one of two categories: either exceptionally well or in need of further practice to continue consolidating their knowledge and understanding. Only a few students fell somewhere in the middle. Again, using assessment data to inform my instruction, I began working with students who required additional support in small groups and 1:1 where possible to provide additional guidance.

Since the start of my lessons on sentence structures several students from the different classes I teach have shared that they didn’t know there was so much to know about sentences and that they feel their ability to construct sentences has improved from the lessons. For me this serves as a reminder that spending the time and energy to explicitly teach students how to construct sentences should not be underestimated.