The Word On The Street Blog

The Word On The Street Learning Tent hosts family-friendly literacy programming

The Word On The Street Toronto is dedicated to the promotion of local literacy organizations. The festival shows its support each year by providing free exhibit space to 20 literacy groups in the Exhibitor Marketplace to help them promote their programs, attract new tutors and volunteers, and raise funds.

The Word On The Street is partnering with seven community groups this year to program the Learning Tent. The Learning Tent is a family-friendly destination where experts in the fields of literacy and education will share informative and entertaining activities, and introduce the public to a range of community literacy projects.

We’re pleased to announce that our Literacy Programming Partners for the 2015 festival are ONBIDA (the Ontario branch of the International Dyslexia Association), Frontier College, Vallum Society for Education in Arts and Letters, Ontario Science Centre, The Ontario Cultural Society of the Deaf (OCSD) and Silent Voice, and First Book Canada.  For a full schedule of Learning Tent activities, visit The Word On The Street’s website.

 Learning Tent Highlights:

• In the Recognize the warning signs of dyslexia workshop, speech-language pathologists Jana Leggett and Sherry Raffalovitch lead a dyslexia simulation, teaching participants how to identify students at risk, and how to intervene to help students overcome their reading and writing difficulties.

• Canada’s original literacy organization, Frontier College, believes in developing quality learning opportunities to motivate the next generation of readers and leaders. Join Frontier College in Math Twister and Picture Bingo, classic games with a fun and educational twist! Each visitor will receive a free new children’s book.

• Vallum Society for Education in Arts and Letters and author Greg Santos invite visitors to write a poem with “Newspaper + marker = blackout poetry.” This activity illustrates poet James Tate’s remark: “Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.”

• Join The Ontario Science Centre for an explosion of brainstorming, building, rethinking and…more rebuilding as you tackle real world problems. Working together to solve a challenge, festivalgoers are invited to design, build and test probable solutions using a variety of common but  unexpected materials within unreasonable limits of time and resources, with ambiguous directions and changing conditions. The Ontario Science Centre’s facilitators will guide guests toward solutions as they exercise ingenuity, innovativeness and imagination in a fun, creative atmosphere.

• In the ASL Storytelling, Rhythms and Rhymes segment, renowned Deaf storytellers bring American Sign Language (ASL), Deaf culture and Deaf heritage to the stage, with rhymes and rhythms, personification, poetry, rap, and storytelling like no other.

• First Book Canada invites you to a presentation of The Legend of Ninja Cowboy Bear with author and illustrator Hilary Leung. Join Hilary for a fun Reading Celebration, with a chance to meet the author and receive a free copy of his book!