Hello! My name is Benjamin Johnson and I’m an educator here at Out of the Box Academy. Since coming to work with Sheila Erickson back in 2016, I’ve had quite the journey along the path that is Roadways, learning just as much as the kids who benefit from the program. I come from a linguistic background with particular interests in grammar, phonetics, and morphology. Roadways is a stellar program for educating on these vital topics, topics I firmly believe should have a place within our existing provincial education program, but which sadly seem to be always lacking in some way or another within the classroom setting.

Seeing as it wasn’t so long ago that I was an elementary-aged student myself, I have vivid memories of learning phonics in my Grade 2 classroom for one hour every Tuesday morning. We used an overhead projector and the level of student engagement could, to put it mildly, not have been any lower. This period of time was my one and only instance of exposure to phonics-based learning until I reached university level and had my eyes opened to its fundamental nature.

Roadways employs a number of different strategies to engage students and to educate on phonics in a relaxed but structured environment. Students participate in activities like word sorts (helping them recognize patterns and exceptions in word groups), AVKO (helping them to recognize common morphemes and apply them in everyday spelling) and Making Words (helping them to employ prior linguistic knowledge of letters and letter groups), all of which I can say have pleasantly astounded me in their effectiveness, confirming that which I already knew: phonics-based learning is vital to success in reading. This is particularly evident for our students with learning disabilities, who just can’t seem to make words work in their favour. By employing strategies like the above, they can dismantle words, play with words, and recognize patterns in words, turning them from frightening endeavours into something much more malleable and manageable. Roadways essentially takes students’ mountains and turns them into molehills.

I have enjoyed watching my students grow in Roadways over the past three years. There is nothing more enjoyable to me than being able to witness my kids constantly experiencing “A-ha!” moments and finally understand concepts that have caused them so much anxiety and stress in the past. As a sufferer of an anxiety disorder myself, being able to assist in that sort of relief has been so rewarding that it’s difficult to put into words. The students and I work hard every day to make the world a more understandable environment and to try to make learning fun again. Hopefully you’ll join us and see what all the fuss is about!