English Tutoring
Nurturing Minds, Moulding Lives.
Step Up Academy’s English Teachers understand the importance of building Reading, Writing and Oral Communication skills as every piece of work we do builds a specific skill. Each reading and writing activity we complete with our students connects to the Ontario Curriculum with carefully crafted rubrics and assessment tools to check for understanding. With regular assessments, our teachers, students and families always know how students are improving and what their next steps are.
Each grade develops specific skills, especially when referring to the Ontario Curriculum expectations. Listed below are the various Reading, Writing, Oral Communication and Media Literacy Skills we develop at Step Up Academy throughout Grades 1 to 12:
Oral Communication Skills:
Develop public speaking strategies.
Communicate their ideas and opinions to an audience using various verbal and non-verbal cues.
Establish effective listening skills by focusing on different strategies such as note-taking, restating, and responding to the information they receive.
Make inferences based on the tone, presentation style, and gestures of the presenter.
How to use visual aids such as powerpoint, prezi, google slides, etc. to enhance a presentation rather than distract from the main point or just read off of it.
Reading Skills:
Read a variety of texts ranging from short stories, novels, graphic texts, news articles, etc.
Basic reading comprehension and being able to retell what has been read
The ability to make connections between reading material and the world, self, media and/or other texts.
Make inferences based on observations and prior knowledge to develop active reading strategies.
Analyse texts for the different messages and ideas they present and discuss how these points are made.
Writing Skills:
Focus on before writing strategies such as planning work using mind maps, webs, lists, and other strategies that will allow students to organize their thoughts.
Invest time in to drafting or writing a rough copy of work instead of jumping to a final copy right away.
Build research strategies to use information that is on the internet and be able to sort through to see what can be used in writing.
Explore different points of view in their writing.
Learn how to edit and revise their work according to the expectations put out.
Use vocabulary that presents a specific message by consciously choosing specific language.
Read work out loud to develop their editing strategies to ensure that there is sentence fluency and flow in writing.
Media Literacy Skills:
Make inferences based on a range of media sources based on observations and prior knowledge.
Recognize the different points of view present in media, how these messages are developed and the impact it has on the audience.
Recognize the different forms of media and their characteristics.