 Hi, my name is Sherry Johnston with the ERLC and it's my pleasure today to provide a quick overview of the literacy and numeracy progressions recently released from Albert Education. Let's start at the beginning. Where did they originate from? Well, if we go back to 2013 and the ministerial order on student learning, it was a very clear direction from the minister stating that all students will use and employ literacy and numeracy to construct and communicate meaning. From that point we have seen most of the new tools being developed by Albert Education containing some kind of a focus on literacy and numeracy skills. So from that point we saw a guiding framework released in 2016 that was designed to support the curriculum developers who are working on our new curriculums and standard seven speaks to this aspect because they are mandated to provide clear evidence of support for literacy and numeracy within and across subjects and if you have the document you'd also notice interestingly that standard six speaks to this holistic nature and really wanting to maximize the interconnectedness of our content areas and really helping teachers work within and across subjects and standard eight speaks to competencies. So all of these tools as they're getting released will really start to work in support one another as we move forward. If we look at the goal that Albert Education has set out for the developers, all of these components come together. So they've asked the question, what concepts do our students need to know? What procedural knowledge should they be developing? What competencies are going to support those aspects and what about the progressions? Which aspects of literacy and numeracy will contribute to that success and all of that is bundled together in the new learning outcomes they are developing. So it's a very ambitious work and we are going to see all of these pieces aligned together. If we look at the definition that Albert Education released in 2015, they defined literacy as this, the ability, confidence and willingness to engage with language to acquire, construct and communicate meaning in all aspects of daily living. The parallel definition is numeracy and you will see it's quite similar. The emphasis here is engaging with quantitative or spatial information to make informed decisions in all aspects of daily living. To support this, recently the ARPDC developed these visuals. It's simply the definitions broken up into the keywords. These are available on the resource page. If you feel these might be helpful to post or have some conversations with staff and students, they're available for you. Another supporting piece that Albert Education created a few years ago is a short video called A World to Discover. And A World to Discover is all about looking at literacy in daily life. Going beyond thinking that it's just communicating and reading in our language arts classes, but also thinking about how does it come into play in reading music and dancing and all aspects of our life. So if you wanted a helpful place to stop and talk with staff, and that might be it. Now I'd like to take a few minutes just to help you understand some of the shifts that's been happening in the field. We've been talking about basic literacy and this will be familiar to most people because this is where we all began learning how to read, writing for the first time and really building up those foundational skills. About 10 years ago there was a shift and we started talking about content literacy. So we wanted to know how can we use our good literacy strategies and help students make sense of their texts and all their subject areas. So we started talking about all teachers as teachers of literacy and we asked how could we predict, how could we anticipate, how could we make connections, how could we make corrections if there was a point of confusion. So all of our good strategies were starting to be applied everywhere. Now in recent years we've started talking about disciplinary literacy. So this is a notch up because in this case we actually want students to not just get better at reading their texts but we actually want them to approach their texts as if they were a subject specific, historian, a mathematician, a geographer. We actually want them to apply a different lens as if they were a discipline specialist. So let's take a look at some of these skills in the chart. We can start with math. You can see that if we are reading something in math we are looking at precise rereading, close reading, looking for key information. Hopefully students are visualizing those problems and understanding those symbols. That's not necessarily what we do in social studies. Social studies, I want my students to have that critical lens. Who wrote this piece? Is it from a particular perspective? Whose perspective is not represented? Is there a bias? Is it correct, accurate, valid, source? What's the text structure? Is it chronological? Well what era of history ended it? What came before? What's the end result? And then we switch gears to science. In science I want my students reading carefully, fact based, step by step, connecting vocabulary words to concepts we already know and understanding how things work together. It's not necessarily what I want to do with my students in language arts. Here I'm going to draw a lot more on my thinking processes, interpreting, maybe analyzing the craft, connecting pieces, text, how do they impact society. So there's a lot of different thought happening. So you can see as we step back that these are skills we want to develop in our students as they move up the grades. So literacy is shifting a bit. Now let's change gears and talk about numeracy. So just like we saw in literacy, Alberta education also developed a numeracy video called The World to Investigate. Another nice short video, great talking point, and really designed to help people understand that numeracy isn't about our math classes. Numeracy is about things that happen in our everyday lives and really starting to see the broad applicability and why it's so important that we talk about it every time there's an opportunity in our subjects. We zoom back to that definition we saw earlier. Let's take a look at the quantitative side. That's an aspect that most of us are quite familiar with because we live that in our daily life. Yesterday I was out getting some groceries and of course we're making buying decisions about should I buy a single, should I take them to the sale and buy two or three or something I probably don't need, money. So lots of pieces around quantitative that we're quite familiar with. But let's look at the spatial side. This is the one that we've been talking more about lately with students and the idea of shape and space and measurement and estimating, GPS, location, direction, and you know I have to say the lovely lady that was bagging my groceries yesterday she could maybe use a little support in the spatial awareness area because my groceries are in that bag upside down, sideways, they did not fit the bag right. It was it was a very interesting situation I had to backpack it all. So these are very helpful skills. Let's look closer. So here's another example as we think about patterns. Who doesn't love 10 grams? I grew up just loving 10 grams. Looking at 2D, 3D shapes and folding and flattening and making these nets estimating as we as we talked about and and look at this Inuit art. Isn't this cool? So what's happening here is that it reminds me of we made those snowflakes and you think about how if they rolled that bark up and they bit on it with their teeth until they made all the impressions they wanted and then when they unrolled it they revealed the art there. So what an interesting interesting piece of work and then if you look at some of the notes here on the screen you'll see that so many of our inventions are actually attributable back to spatial reasoning. So if you're not convinced yet let's look at some research. There's a piece here the second one I'm particularly intrigued with it talks about our four-year-olds and if we watch and observe how they play with blocks that's actually a predictor of high school math many years later. In fact it was so predictive it out predicted general math scores. So maybe it's time to pull out our jigsaw blocks our jigsaw puzzles our blocks all of these things to help open up that spatial awareness and here's a helpful chart and if you wanted a talking point this is where I would invite teachers to think about which aspects of spatial reasoning are already happening in your context in your classrooms and which ones can we maximize because this is evident in our phys ed classes in our health classes heck it might even be happening in our french classes so how can we maximize spatial reasoning and really honor this idea that we are all responsible and we are all teachers of numeracy. The really good news here is that spatial reasoning can be taught so all of those activities you talked about video games Tetris who remembers Tetris let's see how we can incorporate our design tasks all of these pieces to help students build these skills. So with that that brings us to the conclusion of our overview and if you find the resource page you'll see our two other webinars that address specifically what's in the literacy numeracy progressions and how they're organized and best of all how you can use them to plan in classrooms and support the outcomes and help teachers and students be more successful so all the best hope that helps