Developing Writing Skills

• Writing in different ways or forms – making questions and lists, labeling, composing formal letters and essays, taking notes, making posters and pamphlets, creating poetry, songs, dialogue, narrative and captions, scripting and journaling.
• Writing for different audiences – Elders, children, families, community members, funders, etc.
• Writing for different purposes – to entertain, inform, present, persuade, self-reflect, request, make plans, instruct, explain, summarize, announce, invite, to give an opinion.

Developing Numeracy Skills

Numeracy is an important part of literacy and being literate. It refers to a person’s ability to effectively and confidently work with numbers. It includes the ability to calculate numbers, read graphs, tables, charts and time lines, measure and estimate.

We encourage literacy instructors to integrate opportunities for learners to develop numeracy skills while working on oral history projects. The following ideas are ways groups could build numeracy skills through oral history projects:

• Creating budgets for project costs.
• Checking maps and calculating distances traveled in the stories – between camps, hunting grounds and family settlements.
• Reading maps and plotting trips.
• Comparing costs to buy items at the time of the story and now.
• Working with community statistics.
• Checking with Environment Canada to compare average temperatures and precipitation in the time periods the group is researching. Calculating the average change in temperature. Working with ratios to compare temperatures.

Intergenerational Literacy

Intergenerational literacy is the way children and other adult family members use language skills, literacy skills and cultural information to do day-to-day tasks, to keep important traditional and cultural knowledge alive.¹ Literacy programs that include people of all ages help to enrich and develop the literacy skills of both adults and children at the same time. Your group may decide to invite children, Elders and other extended family members to participate in your Oral History project. Below we have made some suggestions for including family members with reference to specific kinds of projects: