What does literacy look like in your content area?

Ooh…what a great question!
It is difficult for me to pinpoint an answer for this one. I am a high school learning centre teacher. In Quebec, that means I teach students who have language-based disabilities as well as more severe cognitive delays. So literacy is my content area!

My focus lately is on literacy for being active members of a community. What does that look like? To start:

-We can read each others’ names and recognize who they are
-We can read the headlines in the local paper and have a conversation about them
-We can communicate through a variety of technologies, including our blogs, because it makes us feel part of our class community
-We can have discussions around inspirational quotes and proverbs that include examples from our lives
-We can recognize monetary values of coins so we can purchase our bus tickets and lunches
-We can read our own emotions and know the words to use to express them
-We can read some of the emotions in others, through their words and their body language, and we can react to them in a way that makes sense
-We can express a goal and work on a plan to achieve it
…
That’s what it is starting to look like, at least as of last week. As we continue our year I am hoping that literacy and what it looks like continues to develop in our classroom.

(this post was originally written as a comment on Scott’s blog post My Literacy Question)