Quebec Competencies Chart - Favourite Sports and Athletes

Author: Toronto School Board
Level: Elementary Cycles One and Two
Subject Area: English Language Arts, Personal Development
Lesson Link: Favourite Sports and Athletes

Description: This lesson develops a beginning awareness by students of how they feel towards, and respond to, different sports, and how the media represents athletics. The lesson begins with a class discussion about the sports that students enjoy playing and watching on TV. Students talk about the differences between watching sports on TV and in person, and explore the marketing of sports by looking at the sports-related clothing and toys they own. Students also broaden their understanding of sports by reflecting on how they feel when they get hurt in sports and by discussing issues such as the role of women and the disabled in sports.

This lesson satisfies the following English Language Arts Competencies from the Quebec Education Program:

Competency 1: To Read and Listen to Literary, Popular and Information-Based Texts

Essential Knowledges:

• Uses prior knowledge and personal experience of the content of a text
• Use of pictures and other graphic representations to interpret texts
• Questions and talk with others to clarify and enrich interpretations
• Makes connections to prior knowledge or to other texts
• Uses different reading strategies according to the text type
• Reads, listens to and views a range of self-selected and personally relevant texts that include:
  • Use of personal, social and cultural background and experiences to interpret texts
  • Searching the Internet to locate texts that entertain, promote, and inform
• Develops a personal response process in the context of a community of readers through:
  • Discussion of responses with others individually, on small groups and in the whole class
  • Sharing of responses with others to clarify meaning and enrich interpretation
  • Comparing own responses with those of others at a beginner's level
• Moves beyond the initial response through:
  • Responses to texts in a variety of ways that include talking, writing, the Arts, Media
  • Early attempts to explain own views of a text
  • Discussions of structures and features of text and their impact on the reader
• Begins to identify the view of the world presented in a text through:
  • Making of inferences, when prompted, about the view of the world presented by the text

Competency 3: To Represent Her/His Literacy in Different Media

Essential Knowledges:

• Uses the familiar images, signs, symbols and logos in his/her environment:
  • Recognition that they are made by people for different purposes
  • Recognition that they have meanings/messages
• Uses a repertoire of strategies to unlock messages/meanings in various media texts:
  • Use own questions in order to predict and confirm
  • Draw on prior experience with familiar media texts to understand how they are constructed
• Uses structures and features of texts:
  • Compare structures and features of familiar media texts
• Makes meaning of a media text by:
  • brainstorming
  • drawing on prior knowledge
  • sharing responses with peers
  • making connections to own experiences
  • Identifying and discussing some of the ways in which pictures, illustrations, popular symbols and signs and images enhance the messages/meanings in media texts designed for young viewers
• Consider some of the functions of the media through:
  • Collaboration with peers in pairs, small groups and whole class to clarify, decode and respond to media texts
  • Identifying her/his understanding of the messages/meanings of familiar media texts
  • Describing some of the features of media texts, with content aimed at viewers of the same age and younger, that entertain, inform and promote
• Understands that texts are social and cultural products through:
  • Own response and responses of others:
    • Compares own response with those of peers in order to support and enrich own understanding

Competency 4: To Use Language to Communicate and Learn

Essential Knowledges:

• Shares information with peers and teacher
• Talks about responses and point of view with peers and teacher
• Asks and answers questions from peers and teacher
• Responds to the ideas and points of view of others with sensitivity and interest
• Talks through new ideas and information