On Sept. 20, Daniels Spectrum (originally known as the Regent Park Arts and Cultural Centre) opened its doors.
Daniels Spectrum is a wonderful new 60,000-square-foot facility set up to help people learn art and business, including music and painting classes and moviemaking.
It even includes a Centre for Social Innovation where people with ideas for new businesses work with creative people to think up new ways to make communities better.
It is all part of the rebirth of Toronto’s Regent Park neighbourhood that has been taking place for more than 10 years.
Regent Park is in the south-east end of Toronto. The homes were built over 60 years ago and at that time, its design concept was a wonderful new idea.
Most of the homes looked inward on courtyards and many of the streets didn’t connect to city streets.
Throughout the years, however, that design failed by making it hard for people to be part of the city.
Regent Park remained home to many hardworking families, but it gained a reputation as a dangerous place.
For many years, as crime built up, many people thought it was an area to stay out of. But that’s all changing. Over the past few years, many of Regent Park’s old apartments and houses have been torn down and replaced with new affordable homes and new services that bring people together.
The new facility is one of these services.
It is open to anyone and is a project of Artscape, a non-profit group that creates artistic spaces where people can learn, teach and work. Artscape partnered with Toronto Community Housing and the Daniels Corporation. The facility is located in Toronto on Dundas St. E. between Sumach and Sackville Streets.
CURRICULUM CONNECTIONS
By Kathleen Tilly
Writing/Discussion Prompt
What is a community? Are all neighbourhoods also communities? Why or why not?
How is Regent Park changing from a neighbourhood that some people didn’t want to visit to a thriving, dynamic community?
Reading Prompt: Text Patterns
Articles are often organized in different ways. A lot of this article is organized as a comparison.
What two things does the journalist compare? How does this organization help you to understand the information in the article?
Junior
Identify a variety of organizational pat- terns in a range of texts and explain how they help readers understand the texts (OME, Reading: 2.2).
Intermediate
Analyse increasingly complex texts to identify organizational patterns used in them and explain how the patterns help communicate meaning (OME, Reading: 2.2).
Grammar Feature: Interrupter Commas
Commas are used for a variety of reasons. For example, commas are sometimes used to show interruptions in sentences.
The article states, “For many years, as crime built up, many people thought it was an area to stay out of.” The section of the sentence that is surrounded by commas is an interruption. While the information “as crime built up” is good to know, it is not as important in the sentence.
Write four sentences using interrupter commas.
