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INUVIK - Kids in Jane Dale's kindergarten class at Sir Alexander Mackenzie school have been emphasizing their literacy skills and learning more about each other through special projects this week.

The class is doing this project as a way to learn new words and proper sentence structure.

From left, Melody Bonnetplume-Cardinal, Autumn Blake and Cassandra Collison are students in Jane Dale's kindergarten class at Sir Alexander Mackenzie school. This week, the kids are improving their literacy skills by making a book about the other students in their class. - Dez Loreen/NNSL photo

Dale said the class is learning at a good pace and is happy with the projects.

"The students have been working on this for quite a while now," said Dale.

Each booklet has pages about each child in the class, with a drawn picture of the student and a short sentence about them.

Dale said each sentence is made of words that are cut out of paper and glued into the booklet, in the correct order.

"It gives the children a good understanding of how a sentence is made," she said.

The exercise also teaches the young learners about upper and lowercase letters that are used for names.

Part of the advantage of having the students draw likenesses of the other students is they also learn about details.

"You want the pictures to have eyebrows and eyelashes and things like that," said Dale.

"It's sort of multi-sensory."

To start the project, Dale said each student is put in front of the class and is asked questions, about their favourite colour and what they like to do in their free time, to give other students an idea of how to draw them.

"They'll spell out the student's name by yelling out and calling out letters," said Dale.

"It gives them a real good idea on how to spell their friends' names, too."

Dale said it can be a challenge to deal with the varied levels of capability of each student. The project is good for that, because it helps the teacher identify if a child needs more attention.

Dale said it's important to promote exercises like this one to the students to help them get an understanding of the language at an early age.

"The earlier they can start learning the alphabet, the faster they will learn to read," said Dale.

"The more they read in the lower grades of school, the better chance they have of graduating."