It is time for school again! Who doesn’t love back to school time? Okay, maybe a few grumbly kids out there are not quite as excited as I am. As a kid, I loved the first day of school. My sister and I would have everything ready for days before- the pencil crayons were sharpened, […]

The Power of Procrastination. I will freely admit that the only reason why I am even writing this blog entry is because my Kobo needs to recharge. I promised myself that I would write one blog entry every two weeks this year. Feel free to count on January 1, 2015 to see how well I […]

“When school children close their books in June, they too often forget about reading, writing and arithmetic until September rolls around. For teachers that means a fall filled with remedial work. Educators typically spend four to six weeks getting students back to where they were at the end of the previous academic year. “ This […]

So, the EQAO testing is done for our elementary students for another year. I get a fair number of questions concerning these standardized tests from anxious parents. Many parents feel that these tests are an unnecessary stress on their kids. I don’t have a problem with the test per se, my issue is with the weight […]

Part Three of Three We have recently looked at the two sides of the reading debate. There are positives and negatives to each side, but this post is all about our style. SO WHAT IS BEST? At Leeds Learning Centre, we use a balanced approach. Our programmes are built upon the phonics model; however, we […]

Part Two of Three Last post was about whole word instruction- today’s post is about the other side of the debate. PHONICS Phonics instruction is a “bottom up” method of reading. Students learn the sounds (phonemes) that each letter (grapheme) makes. Rather than teaching just one letter-one sound, phonics also incorporates the combination letters (digraphs) […]

Whole word or phonics? Part One of Three Like anything else, education goes through cycles. Whole word instruction used to be the dominate way to teach reading. Then phonics usurped the reading throne around 1970. Whole word instruction has once again come around in many North American schools. WHOLE WORD You have most likely seen […]

Exams. Most of our kids here at Leeds are close to finished this round of exams and you can see that they are ready to be done with this semester. Shane teaches only high school kids so his last few weeks have been exceptionally busy with students coming in for exam review. Jessica currently has […]