EA teacher sits in front of a group of students, gesticulating and acting out Jabberwocky. The students sit, rapt, and then recite bits of it back.
This is not your typical Grade 2 classroom.
Advanced nonsense poems are but one of the unconventional learning tools used by professor Mary Thelander in her “From 3 to 3” program, currently running in elementary schools in the Toronto District School Board, mainly in Etobicoke. The program aims to develop sequential and narrative reasoning in children from age three to Grade 3, especially those for whom English is a second language. It started off as a research project and moved into classrooms this year, carried out in partnership with U of T’s Centre for Community Partnerships and Office of Student Affairs.
“After I finished my PhD at OISE, I was really interested in how children learn to understand what people mean, and realizing that to understand what somebody else means is a long process,” said Thelander.
She was especially interested in children learning English as a second language. “I wanted to know how children coming from non-Western cultures come to understand what’s going on at school—not just what the teacher said, but the meaning of what she said.”
The program operates in “that tire around Toronto where new families settle,” Thelander said, because it’s designed specifically for children “who are at a disadvantage because of cultural displacement, truncated language development, social isolation, and poverty.”
Thelander said that the opportunity for students to hear stories puts fun ahead of didacticism, getting kids to repeat back stories from fairy tales and literature—as well as poetry, chain rhyming, gestural rhyming—beginning in kindergarten and increasing in complexity over the years. As a result, teachers still use rhyming and oral storytelling up to Grade 3.
“From 3 to 3” relies heavily on tutors: U of T students from a broad range of studies and backgrounds. Thelander had hoped for a student involvement component in the program, and in her research she found that the children who were engaged with tutors did best of all.
“We are launched into a further two years in expanding the program and working with a developing student association to get more students involved with the community,” she said.
Thelander spoke of encouraging results. “One teacher said to me, ‘Mary, we’ve created a monster, they never shut up, they talk all the time—but no no, it’s okay, it’s productive talk.’ And to me, that’s huge.” She added that she saw kindergarteners understand the phrase “jewel-encrusted slipper” because of the teacher’s gestures and the context. “Particularly within a story environment, you can use more complicated language, because the story itself will help children understand language,” she said.
