11am - 12pm Enir Bassani, Toronto Catholic District School Board, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
I wondered if we could implement a general Family Literacy Collection for our libraries so I wanted to see what this workshop was about - Bassani developed a 41 story and song collection for first graders geared for immigrant families in Toronto. He was charged with creating a resource collection which would make immigrant children literate by the end of first grade. In his school district, children are given a half hour lession in either Spanish, Italian or Portuguese. Bassani said literacy skills are transferable from one language to another so learning English skills wouldn't be a stretch but required parental effort.
The Family Literacy Collection offers parents the tools to continue the learning at home and support early literacy skills. The Collection is divided into 6 sets with 41 stories and songs which concentrate on a sound in the English language. Teachers loan out the sets and as parents complete the sets with their child, the next set is loaned out. Each set includes a cd with songs and stories, questions to enhance story, list of words that contain the sound, song that supports sounds in story and activities to enhance learning of the sound.
The 6 set collection is $200, a dvd version is available for $60. I wouldn't recommend the library purchasing the collection because it has such a narrow audience - first graders.
As an aside - the presentation was very jumbled and somewhat excruciating. Bassari began his presentation apologizing for his appearance - his flight arrived last night in LAX and he took a shuttle to San Diego at 3am and he didn't have his luggage or samples of his product. During his presentation he played a sample of a story called "Mitzi is missing" which featured the sound of "i." He then played the supporting song for the story and encouraged the 11 audience members to sing along - with lackluster results. I guess he wasn't happy with the unenthusiastic response so he played the Karoake version of "Mitzi is missing"! There is nothing worse than a presenter trying to get an audience to sing! And in case you're wondering - Mitzi was a missing cat who was later found with a litter of kittens.
Nothing worse than the presenter being out of sorts (and worse, admitting to it) and being unprepared. He shouldn't have shared all that with the audience. If I was there, the minute he started the singing part, there would only have been 10 left.
ReplyDeleteSo, is a family literacy collection a good idea - not his product of course.
MP