Storytelling with Puppets

Thomas, YuBin and Sofia really enjoyed the session.

While working with my Grade 2 and 3 EAL beginners, I am always looking for various ways to motivate them. It is essential to engage my students in assignments that are meaningful and trigger their curiosity. The trick is to combine play and exploration and this time I decided to use puppets. We have several sets of puppets in our EAL elementary department; however, puppets that are created by the children themselves are the most popular. Depending on the time that is available, we can either use the old puppets created earlier (I always try to keep the best ones for the collection) or ask the children the make their own. It is not very time consuming and adds a lot to the process as all the students naturally try to talk and discuss their ideas, consult with each other, choose colors, collaborate and help each other. Even beginners with limited vocabulary and shy students (who are usually reluctant to talk) are highly motivated and become very creative and expressive.

During the last week before the break my students were tired and I chose this activity for all of us to have some fun together.

We started with reading a big book “Who Will Help?”, a version of the little red hen strory that most children are familiar with. It was an easy reading and everybody understood the plot; however, we also discussed the characters, setting and problem.

My students suggested to add some characters and we innovated the story a bit.

We made our puppets and read the story again, acting out some parts of the story. By that time all my students remembered all the events in the story and were ready to retell it without a book.

Thomas and Sofia were real risk-takers and chose to have two various parts.

We performed the story a couple of times swapping the puppets and had a lot of fun.

It was a successful learning experience because all my students even the most reluctant ones were motivated to participate and said their parts. Everybody liked  the lesson and we will definitely do it again.

Unit Vocabulary for EAL Learners

During the last couple of weeks I was teaching new unit vocabulary to my Grade 2 and Grade 3 EAL learners.

In Grade 3 we choose to create a version of an understanding map for the word UNIQUE. During the first session the students were asked what they thought the word UNIQUE meant. They had to draw what UNIQUE was for them. One of our G3 teachers Mrs.Claire Webster prepared a short video for our students to watch prior to the session. It was very helpful and guided their thinking. In the end of the session our Grade 3 students came up with a class definition of the word UNIQUE.

The next time we met, we continued to fill in our understanding map and talked about synonyms. Some students easily came up with the words RARE, DIFFERENT, UNUSUAL. For some students it was more challenging and I added words like SPECTACULAR and SPECIAL to their lists. Again the students had to explain using words and symbols what the word meant to them.

To consolidate the knowledge of the new word we had a discussion about our planet in my EAL class and the majority of my EAL students were able to use the words SPECIAL, UNIQUE, RARE while talking about Earth.

Students in Miss Lisa's class are presenting their understanding maps of the word UNIQUE

Yubin was proud to share her understanding map as well.

In Grade 2 we began to talk about perspective, imagination and art. Once again it was challenging for some of the students. To support my students in constructing their own meaning of more abstract words like PERSPECTIVE I prepared the following activities. First we discussed the images of the words and played the matching game (the students were supposed to match the card with the word and the card with the definition). Our students had to do it in groups and it was interesting to observe the process and to listen to their discussion that took place during the game.

Next they had to work with true/false statement with the new vocabulary and completed a cloze activity. Finally during the second session the students were ready to begin working with personal dictionaries were they had to show their understanding of the word by writing the definition with their own words, creating a symbol for the word and use the word in their own sentence.