Family Literacy Day celebrated across Canada Sunday

EDMONTON- Approximately 42 percent of Canadian adults have low literacy skills. A national initiative is hoping to lower that number, starting with the nation’s younger generation.

January 27 is Family Literacy Day in Canada. It was created in 1999 as a way to raise awareness of the importance of reading and engaging in other literacy-related activities as a family.

“Family literacy is about everyday stuff. When you go to the grocery store make sure your kids are watching you either make your list or look at the flyers or anything like that because kids will model what they see their parents doing or their loved ones doing because they want to be like that,”explained Kim Chung, a program director at the Centre for Family Literacy in Edmonton. “It’s just really being with (your) kids and interacting with them.”

Chung says literacy is about more than just reading and writing, it’s also about developing a foundation for oral language.

“Children need to hear a fluent language spoken all the time around them. Hearing different words, even if they’re not responding to the words they’re still listening, they’re still getting the idea of how language flows.”

Nowadays technology has an effect on many children’s lives and has changed the way many of them learn.

“All of our kids have technology in one way or another. I mean, it’s the 21st century, our kids have cell phones that have so much capacity in them. A lot of our kids (have) iPads and computers,” explained Elise Fenrich, an English teacher at Mother Margaret Mary High School.

Fenrich says rather than change that, teachers at Mother Margaret Mary have learned to embrace technology and use it in their daily lessons.

“We have to communicate with our students and the best way is to kind of communicate the way they will, getting them to use their phones to look things up… and using them in order to interact, to become visual learners.”

But, Fenrich says part of that teaching method also involves ensuring students know how to use technology properly.

“We go through and we teach them how to know what’s right on the internet and what’s the proper usage of language,” Fenrich said. “A lot of the time our students start to abbreviate their language instead of ‘y-o-u’ they’re using just ‘u’ and it’s just correcting them and reminding them that the better you can formulate your words the better you are able to communicate with each other.”

A number of activities were held across the country on Sunday to celebrate Family Literacy Day. Chung says just 15 minutes of literacy-related activities per day can improve a child’s literacy skills dramatically.

With files from Shannon Greer, Global News.