Literacy Design

Today, I watched a great video from the APLC titled Effective Literacy Block Design. There is a lot that goes into teaching literacy wit so many skills that need to be taught, practiced, and revisited. I found this resource both practical and thought-provoking. It packed a lot of valuable strategies into a short amount of time, and although it’s aimed at K–2 educators, I found many ideas relevant and adaptable for my own grade 3 / 4 classroom.

Two key areas stood out to me: the importance of oral language instruction and strategies for helping students expand their sentences.

The video emphasized that strong oral language skills are the foundation for all literacy development. Although I already incorporate conversational activities in my classroom to build community, I hadn’t fully considered the connection between these skills and broader literacy outcomes. The presenters shared concrete ways to explicitly teach oral language, including structured activities like providing prompts, modeling responses, and using routines such as the “sharing train” or “lines of conversation.” These strategies help students engage with each other while building language skills. I especially appreciated the scaffolding techniques for students who struggle; such as echoing the teacher and using repetition to build independence.

The second takeaway was a practical approach to teaching sentence expansion. Writing can be cognitively overwhelming for many students, and the video offered strategies to reduce that cognitive load by breaking down the process into manageable steps. One example was starting with a simple sentence like “I slept” and adding details throughout the week by asking the questions: Who? Where? When? Why? and How? I liked that students gradually build more complex and descriptive sentences through repeated practice.

I feel I can easily apply both strategies to my classroom. When I return on the 20th, I plan to deepen my current daily conversation routines and do more modeling to expand their oral language skills. I also appreciated the quick assessment tool shared for tracking students' participation and progress during these discussions. It’s a helpful reminder that oral work can be monitored and assessed.

As for sentence writing, I’m currently focusing on this area with my students, and am eager to try this method. It offers a way to see clearly where students are at in their sentence construction, and it reminds me to look closely at the foundational skills if students are struggling; something I sometimes overlook in the push to keep moving forward.

In all, I filled five pages of notes while watching Effective Literacy Block Design, which indicates how valuable I found the session. Even though it’s targeted toward classrooms younger than my own, the theories and strategies are easily adaptable to older grades. It was a great reminder of the importance of intentional planning and foundational skill-building in literacy instruction.

References

Alberta Professional Learning Consortium. (Sept. 2025) Effective Literacy Block Design. [Video] YouTube. https://aplc.ca/pd-resource/effective-literacy-block-design/