Although Remembrance Day has passed us by for this year, we continue to remember the people that serve our country and the impact they have made on Canada.  Recently, we began reading a book called, Heart of a Champion, by Ellen Swatrtz.  This book depicts the life of Japanese Canadians living in BC, Canada during WWII.

​As part of the Language Arts program, Listen to Reading is a Daily Five Routine that is embedded into the curriculum.  It offers students a chance to listen for fluency and to discuss important ideas as a class with novels they may not choose to read independently.  For us the learning goals for this novel have been to explore:

• The main idea of content
• Analyze characters
• Understand problems in stories
• Connect reading to our world of today, past and future.

What we practice and learn as a whole class, students practice and review independently through there own reading responses.  The response below is a response we wrote together as a class.  Students use these modeled responses to develop their comprehension skills.  Below is a sample of modeled writing, as it pertains to the development  of reading comprehension.

After reading Chapter 4 of this novel, we discussed and wrote a response together.
“They say they can’t be sure of our loyalty,” (Schwartz, Chapter 4).  The main idea is that the Sakamoto family is being treated differently because they are Japanese.  The Sakamoto father is  the most important character for this chapter. He sees himself and his family as Canadian because he was a soldier fro Canada in WWI.  The problem is that they were asked to prove their identity by two RCMP officers,  The solution for this chapter is that the Sakamoto family decided not to argue with the officers and showed their IDs even though they did not think it was right that they had to.
​Authors: Grade 4/5 Class