In Class Support

The most important component of our EAL elementary programme this year is in class support. Miss Sunkim (our EAL teaching assistant) and I are working collaboratively with Grade 2 and Grade 3 homeroom teachers supporting our EAL learners.

Recently we were supporting our students in developing their writing skills and focusing on recount and persuasive piece writing. The Grade 3 team is practicing the persuasive genre and in Miss Lisa's, Miss Michelle's and Miss Claire's classrooms I was helping our students to understand the structures and think of opinions and reasons. In Miss Anita's and Miss Courtney's classes I worked with a group of students and/or the whole class on shared recount writing. With Miss Karyn's students we had meaningful discussions before they had to participate in an unassisted recount writing activity.

Shared recount created by Miss Courtney's students

I would like to share with you here some of Pauline Gibbons' strategies that were successfully used in the classrooms. 

“It is a special kind of help that assists learners to move toward new skills, concepts or levels of understanding…… It is future-oriented.” (Gibbons, 2002 P 10)

WRITING

Each genre has its own difficulties – personal writing and reports being less demanding than imaginative. Oral preparation is important and pupils should be encouraged to link writing to experience. 

Teachers will probably be using most of these strategies already.

• Oral preparation is very important to help child build a meaningful context from their own experience.

• Questions provide a structure and help the writer focus.
• Grids and matrices provide key information to support sentence writing – pupils find it difficult to write notes and tend to write full sentences when planning.
• Cloze procedures reinforce key vocabulary and ideas.
• Sequencing supports understanding of structure.
• Provide models to illustrate genre
• Use something the class are reading as a model and/or make into a Cloze text to practice vocabulary, verbs, adjectives etc
• The class help create a word bank at the start of the lesson- this should include verbs, thinking of tenses, and adjectives.
• Practise key structures before writing
• Use pictures to support understanding – could be used as matching exercise with model text
• Add captions and speech bubbles to pictures
• Provide sentence starters and writing frames
• Link writing with listening comprehension – this is an alternative way of giving a model
• With help of the class write a simple story on the board and ask pupils to add more detail.
• Pupils find planning difficult – use mind maps or other visuals – Inspiration has a good variety – time lines, cause and effect, narrative sequence, venn diagrams etc
• Sequencing – cut up model text or use scribed writing.
• Scribing for the pupil helps them get started and can extend their language as scribe produces full sentences from words provided.
• Pupils have writing buddy ( could be same as reading buddy).
• Clicker grids – add examples
• Instead of returning a pupil’s writing, if time permits, produce a word processed corrected version.  This can be also used for cloze etc. Using the child’s own work is more meaningful