2021 Census Adult Education Kit—Activity 3: Relationship vocabulary

Overview

In this activity, students will practise language skills while investigating relationship vocabulary used to describe people who share a dwelling. Students will create visual representations of households, identify people who share a residence, and describe relationships using Census of Population terminology.

Census knowledge

• Identify important information about people living in a household.
• Review sample questions asked in the 2021 Census of Population.
• Practise using supporting documents to answer the types of questions that will be asked in the 2021 Census of Population.

Specific learning objectives

Listening

• Understand short, descriptive communications on a topic of personal relevance (Canadian Language Benchmark 4).

Speaking

• Describe scenes or pictures, providing adequate descriptions and using appropriate vocabulary (Canadian Language Benchmark 5).

Reading

• Locate and use one or two pieces of information from moderately complex formatted texts, such as maps or tables (Canadian Language Benchmark 5).

Writing

• Reduce short, factual, oral discourse to a descriptive text using visual supports and vocabulary lists (Canadian Language Benchmark 5).
• Write short paragraphs to describe a familiar situation (Canadian Language Benchmark 4).

Essential employment skills areas

• Communicate orally
• Work with others
• Use documents—blueprints, tables, icons and legends

Materials

Supplies

• Pens or pencils

Handouts

• Dwelling layout
• Household relationship icons
• Census vocabulary from the Instructor's Guide (optional)
• Profiles of Canadians handout from Stand-alone activity: Profiles of Canadians (optional)

Activity

1. Post and explain the definitions of the terms "dwelling" and "household."

• Dwelling: a place where a person or group of people live or could live. The dwelling's entrance must be accessible without passing through the living quarters of some other person or group of people.
• Household: a person or group of people who live in the same dwelling.

2. Explain that one census questionnaire is completed for all the people who live in one household and that a building can have more than one dwelling. For example, an apartment block with six apartments has six dwellings, because each dwelling has a separate door to a hallway that leads outside.

A household may consist of

3. Provide students with the Dwelling layout handout. Students can add to the illustration or change features as desired.

Alternatively, have students

• draw a rough layout of the floor plan of their current residence
• draw a rough layout of the floor plan of the residence of the character they created in Activity 2.

4. On a separate sheet of paper, ask students to make a list of the members of their household who live in the dwelling created in Step 3. Explain that these are the individuals for whom they will need to provide information during the 2021 Census.

Who in your household should be included on the census questionnaire?

• Yourself
• Everyone else who usually lives in your household, such as
  • your spouse or common-law partner
  • your children (including foster children), including babies born on or before May 11, 2021
  • your parents
  • other relatives who live in your household (e.g., aunt, cousin, grandparents, brother-in-law)
  • your roommates (i.e., people who are not related to you, but who share your dwelling; they often share the rent and other expenses)
  • your lodgers or boarders (i.e., people who rent a room in your dwelling)
  • people who are temporarily away from your dwelling, such as students who return to live with their parents when classes are over.

Who should NOT be included on the census questionnaire?

• People who have a home somewhere else (in Canada or in another country) and who usually live at another address.

Alternatively, if students are single, live alone or are part of a very small family unit, provide them with the Profiles of Canadians handout from the Stand-alone activity: Profiles of Canadians. Students can select one or more of the individuals or families from the handout to practise additional relationship vocabulary.

5. Give students time with a partner to verbally describe their dwelling and some of the people who live with them, using their own words (e.g., son, wife's daughter from the first time she was married, sister, husband's mother, person who lives with me, non-related person, daughter's friend from school, boyfriend).

Guiding questions

• What kind of dwelling is this?
• How many people are members of this household?
• Are they all family or are they connected in different ways?
• How are they related or connected to one another?
• How are they connected to you or Person 1?

6. Explain to students that, if they are the person answering the census questions, they will be called "Person 1" and will need to describe how each person in their household is connected to them.

7. Provide students with the Profiles of Canadians handout included in the Stand-alone activity: Profiles of Canadians and have them select a profile. You can assign a profile to each individual student or to a pair of students.

Alternatively, allow students to create their own households. If students are comfortable, they may incorporate details from their own household into the activity.

It should be noted that family titles differ from culture to culture; this should be taken into account when students are attempting to explain who lives in their household and their relationship to Person 1.

8. Ask students to complete the Dwelling layout handout. Post or provide students with the Household relationship icons handout and review the terminology. Prompt students to add the appropriate icons to the dwelling layout, starting with Person 1, and adding other people who live there or who are currently staying in the dwelling.

If using the Profiles of Canadians handout included in the Stand-alone activity: Profiles of Canadians for this activity, it may be a good idea to demonstrate the activity using the individual profiles and encourage students to use the family profiles to complete their own worksheets.

If students find the vocabulary of the Household relationship icons handout challenging, review the following terminology and post the definitions in the classroom for students to reference:

• Adopted child: a child who has been legally given the rights, privileges and duties of a child and heir by an adoptive family.
• Common-law partner: a partner in a romantic relationship between two people who live together as a couple but who are not married, regardless of the duration of the relationship. In Canada, a common-law partner may be of the opposite or same sex.
• Father-in-law or mother-in-law: the father or mother of one's spouse.
• Foster child: a child who has been placed in the care of a person or family, but who is not related to that person or family by birth or marriage.
• Spouse: a partner in a marriage. In Canada, a spouse may be an opposite-sex or same-sex partner in marriage.
• Roommate: a person who shares a room, apartment or home with another person.
• Lodger or boarder: a person who pays to live and have meals at another person's house.

9. After the icons have been added to the illustration, ask students to write one or two short paragraphs to describe each other's households, using vocabulary from the census and describing household members' relationships to Person 1.

Example observations

• I see that there are six people in this household.
• There is a person in the kitchen. He's Person 1 and he is not married. There's another person in the living room and he's Person 1's roommate.
• Person 1 is a woman and she's in the living room. She lives with two other women. This person in the bedroom is her daughter and this person in the bathroom is her sister.
• A family of four lives in this household. Person 1, here in the kitchen, is the mother. This is her son watching TV, and these are her parents at the table in the dining room.
• A family of five lives in this household. Person 1 is the husband of Person 2. Person 3 is his son and Person 4 is his foster child. Person 5 is his father-in-law.

Modifications

If students require additional support, try the following:

• As they are describing people and places in the dwelling layout, review household vocabulary for rooms and for common furniture and fixtures.
• Students should focus exclusively on the relationships in their own household and should only share if they are comfortable doing so.
• Discuss the different relationships listed on the Household relationship icons handout before beginning the activity. Have students circle terms that apply to their households.
• Create terminology flash cards with images or brief definitions for the relationships on the other side. Tape cards in a grid pattern to a wall in the classroom so that students can walk over and flip a particular card for a definition.

If students require an additional challenge, try the following:

• Encourage students to identify the information that has not been included in the profiles, but that would be useful to know about a particular profile (e.g., geographic location of dwelling, type of dwelling or additional languages spoken).

Next steps

• Have students work in small groups to combine completed profiles of individuals from this activity to create families, households or "snapshots" of a community. Use classroom materials or available software to create family trees or representations (such as an aerial map) of a part of the communities in which these families live. Post the new families or communities in the classroom and encourage students to use new relationship vocabulary when describing them to classmates.