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Preparing students for the transition from Grade 8 to Grade 9 is one that educators need to focus in on and take extremely seriously. As I teach a Grade 9 course, I have often found that students are not only misplaced in the stream they have chosen for the course, but are lacking the basic literacy skills that will carry them in all subjects. I am part of a York Catholic School Board committee called “Project Lighthouse”. This committee has been specifically designed including teachers at the Intermediate and Senior levels to discuss the very issue of transition. This was spearheaded by teachers at the Secondary level who were finding that students were beginning Secondary School lacking some of the basic literacy skills needed. The research questions I tackled were: What specific skills do students need to be successful in Secondary School? How will a student’s level of literacy skills help or hinder in courses that are in other subject areas other than English? To collect the data for the research questions I have proposed, I enlisted the help of the other Senior level teachers involved in “Project Lighthouse”, who are from different schools in the School Board. I asked the two teachers to ask one of their Grade Nine classes (two were academic level, and two were applied level) to complete a grammar worksheet with questions taken from Grammar Works 9, as well as read and answer the question to the article, “Einstein’s Brain: Built for Brilliance”. Although a small and short task I felt that it had a good mechanic component with grammar, as well as a good processing component to the one question which followed the article. I chose a literacy based research because I feel that if students have trouble with literacy skills, they will not be successful in any area of curriculum that requires reading and writing. The grammar worksheet the Grade Nine classes completed was a basic grammar review of elements that included: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and end punctuation.
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