EFL Class

I just recently learned about the Learn Reflect Share visible thinking routine and decided to practice it during my grade 2 English as Foreign Language lesson. My students had to answer two questions about what they learned and why it was important for them. The third question was about what their friends learned. Children had to work in pairs and ask each other to fill in the answer to the last question.

I prepared a substitution table for my beginners with some words and expressions for them to use when building their sentences. My intermediate ELLs used the same scaffold but only for ideas as they had enough language to express themselves.

It was a good choice of activity and my scaffolds worked well. Most importantly it was at the right level and my children felt confident and comfortable doing it.

In the end we had a sharing circle and everybody had a chance to exchange what they and their friends learned during this unit.

Mollymoon and Maly were parters and enjoyed learning and sharing.

Kim Veng is  waiting for Sak to come back and continue. Samir and Jayden, Maly and Mollymoon were partners

Developing Reading Skills with EAL Beginners

We continue to develop the reading and thinking skills of our EAL beginners in Grade 3. Today we had a very productive guided reading session. We read a story about a boy in a wheelchair and my students were quick to make connections to children's rights. One of the guest speakers during the unit talked about the rights of disabled children and our students learned a lot and were very impressed.  

First we discussed the cover and talked about the author and the illustrator. We also looked at the pictures and made predictions about the story.  After that we read the story taking turns and stopping to discuss unfamiliar words or interesting or challenging ideas. Next we talked about how to make retelling easier and what tools can we use. We discussed mind maps and how to make them and decided to make one. Most of my beginners never had a chance to make a mind map so I modeled it for them. We talked briefly about what a symbol is and how to use it in your mind map. Finally our mind maps were ready and we practiced a shared retelling. All my students were engaged in this activity and even those that were shy had to speak and share their thinking about the story. We also practiced reading out loud and the students greatly benefited from this.

We all enjoyed our class. My plan for the next session is to ask my students to retell the story with the help of their own mind map. We will see how they manage.

Jade was the first one to make the connection between the story and our unit about children's rights.

In Class Support

This week was like harvest time both in Grade 3 and Grade 2 as we enjoyed the last week of our units, sharing with peers and parents, and reflecting on our learning and teaching.

In Grade 2, I supported my EAL students while they were getting ready for the summative assessment presentations and sharing sessions. 

Miss Anita's students are creating their posters.

Visal researched old and new trains in Cambodia.

Maly is writing her reflection with two stars and a wish.

In Grade 3 our ELLs were involved in cooperative practicing of their presentations and creating their Google doc. reflections.

Miss Michelle's students enjoyed cooperative learning.

Yubin and I are making sure everything is just right on the poster.

Yubin and Dyna are typing in their reflections.

In Class Support

Jennifer shared some good thinking while working on her summative task.

This week my Grade 2 students were working on their summative assessment, reflecting on how their new knowledge about artifacts helped them to understand the history of Cambodia.

The Grade 3 students had an adventurous week of filed trips and action taking. One of the field trips was to CCF (Cambodian Children Fund). ISPP Students learned a lot about how CCF helps the community and took action, donating clothing to the fund.







My EAL beginners had lots of fun presenting 'The Turnip' story. We read 'The Turnip' story and decided to act it out. Sofia ended up having two parts - the Cat and the narrator. All my students enjoyed the activity and practiced being expressive and loud and clear when speaking. Our plan is to have even more fun with 'The Mitten' story next week.

Minato - the Man, Yubin - the Woman, Thomas - the Dog, Sofia - the Cat and the  Narrator, Thida - the Mouse

I had an opportunity to work one on one with my beginner Grade 3 student Yubin. We worked on Yubin's reading comprehension skills. Yubin read a story about a Dragon with a cold. Before reading I talked to Yubin about the cover, title, the author and the illustrator. Yubin made her predictions about the story. During the reading we stopped several times to discuss the new words or just the meaning of the challenging passages. Yubin enthusiastically answered my questions about the characters, setting, problem and solution.

She managed to make a personal connection to the text. Finally we learned about what is a summary and how to write it. In this video Yubin is answering my questions about the story and reads the summary of the story that we completed during this session.

EFL Classes

During the EFL classes this week my Grade 2 students were creating ISPP timelines. Boys and girls had to work with a partner from their classroom as the plan was to take the completed ISPP Timeline back to the class and share it with their peers.

My students had an opportunity to discuss and compare photographs, sequence them and enrich their knowledge about the history of our school. It was exciting to observe them making their discoveries and hear their enthusiastic comments. It was a loud class and we all talked a lot with each other. The next step will be to practice presenting our timelines.

Sak and Jayden worked really well together.

Maly and Mollymoon are sorting out the images before pasting them on the timeline.

EFL Classes This Week

My G2 students continued presenting their posters about Cambodia this week.
We all were impressed with the collaboration between the children. Alicia and Kim Veng formed a team and their presentation was really good. Samir worked with Jennifer and both of them demonstrated a great choice of strategies. Samir chose to lead in this activity and supported Jennifer where it was needed. Hailey, with her limited English words and expressions was a real risk-taker and faced the challenge of presenting in front of the group. Visal missed a couple of classes and had to work hard to catch up with the rest of presenters. However, his presentation about the Khmer language was one of the best.

Jennifer and Samir are speaking about Khmer celebrations

.

Alicia and Kim Veng are speaking about Khmer houses.

Visal is speaking about the Khmer language.

Hailey  is speaking about land in Cambodia.

We also read several non-fiction texts about Cambodia and completed a cloze activity.



Further exploring the theme of rights and responsibilities, my G3 EFL students read "The Turkey Girl", a native American folk story.

I wanted my children to interact with the text, activate their prior experience and be able to employ the four strategies : generating questions, summarizing,  clarifying, and predicting. That is why I chose the reciprocal reading strategy. I wanted my EAL readers to construct meaning from the text by relying on prior experience to parallel, contrast, or affirm what the author suggested. Without meaning construction, learning does not take place. 

In order to more effectively support our students we created three subgroups within our EFL G3 group. My TA, Ms. Kim, worked with Minato and Zereach, I worked with my Korean students Yubin and Thomas using the modeling and bridging scaffolding strategies to support them, while the rest of the students worked independently. We all also used the "Think Aloud"strategy to make students aware of their own thinking processes while speaking, reading and writing.

In Class Support

My Grade 2 students continued their research about artifacts, practicing the academic language of the unit and thinking about timelines. In Miss Courtney's classroom the children worked with the National Museum Artifacts. In Miss Anita's room the students had a unique chance to learn about Miss Anita's family history and timeline and use family souvenirs for their research.

I was using the modeling and contextualization scaffolding strategies to help our students make connections between themselves and the content of the research and support them in this learning experience.

Sak is presenting the results of his research.

In Miss Claire's Grade 3 classroom we had a great collaborative teaching session. Our students were able to create persuasive posters with strong images, using persuasive sentence starters. All our students had a chance to analyze the presented posters and discuss the persuasive elements used by their peers.

Arvid was very expressive presenting his poster.

In Miss Lisa's classroom I worked with the EAL learners supporting them in their task to create a script for their puppet video. Yubin and Dyna created puppets of children and their next step was to think of dialogue about children's rights. They chose to discuss the right to have a family. I was using modeling, bridging and primary language support scaffolding strategies. I modeled dialogue writing and helped my students to activate their prior knowledge relevant to the unit theme. I also encouraged Yubin and Dyna to have a meaningful discussion of the right in focus and make personal connections.  

Both Yubin and Dyna enjoyed writing the script.

Book Character Day

On Wednesday all the students and teachers in elementary school dressed up as their favourite book characters. The day was full of fun activities and in my EFL class we read a story about my character. 

When I came to school dressed as a milkmaid lots of my students asked me who I was as it wasn’t easy for them to guess. During my EFL class I read a fable about The Milkmaid and Her Pail and we also watched a short video. Before, during and after reading we practiced comprehension strategies. My students had an opportunity to predict, connect, question, summarize, think about the character and create a written story map.

We also had a discussion about the lesson of the story.

It was clear that all my students enjoyed the class and the story.

Working with Beginners

At the end of the day on Wednesday, Thomas from Miss Michelle’s class and I were working on creating a little speech for Thomas’s child character puppet. Thomas wrote down some ideas and used the passport that he had issued for the child character calling him Jack Moon.  We practiced presenting and made this video.

After watching the video together, Thomas realized that he needed to speak louder and hopefully will do it when he has his final presentation in Miss Michelle class later this week.

The Grade 3 students in Miss Claire's class were creating poems on Friday. Minato wrote a poem about what he saw on the way to school. I reminded Minato to use descriptive language and Minato began to think about the color and sizes of the things he saw.

At the end of the session Minato was proud of his poem.

EFL Grade 2 Classes this Week

This was a busy week or our Grade 2 students and teachers as we had several field trips and learned a lot about the Cambodian past.  In my EFL class I decided to talk more about the concept of change and refresh my students’ knowledge about Cambodian culture and traditions. My students were offered to work with a partner and to create a poster about Khmer food, climate, houses, transport, language, etc.

They used the learning text and the images that were printed out in advance. After the poster was completed the children had to practice presenting the information to the rest of the group. It was interesting to observe how my students worked in pairs and shared the roles when getting ready for the final presentation. 

Children are busy practicing their presentations.

At the end of the class boys and girls began presenting. The first 3 pairs were very successful and the audience was able to state the new facts they learned after each presentation. We will continue our presentations next week.

Guilia and YiLei are speaking about Khmer food.

Maly and Mollymoon are speaking about the Cambodian climate and teaching us that rains that we have in Cambodia are called monsoons.

“Generate – Sort – Connect – Challenge” Visible thinking Routine

EFL G3 – Children’s Rights

At the beginning of the unit we had a discussion with my G3 EAL learners about children’s rights. During the first week of the unit we read several easy books related to the topic and later I wanted my students to focus on certain parts of the stories and select ideas related to children’s rights.

Being aware of the complexity of the concept for my students, I decided to introduce the visible thinking routine called “Generate –Sort – Connect – Challenge”. The routine should help my students to construct their understanding step by step and provide more opportunities for talking and sharing with their mainstream peers.

After reading several books (as well as materials shared with me by the classroom teachers) the first step for us was to generate the list of children's rights that we thought we would like to focus on. We also talked about the responsibilities that go together with rights.

For the next class I prepared cards with rights and cards with responsibilities. My students worked in 3 groups sorting the cards and matching the rights to the responsibilities.

Dyna was proud to read his page and share his illustrations.

Thomas is reading his page of the book.

The next step was to make personal connections. I asked the children to illustrate each pair of rights and responsibilities and we created a big book.  In order to make sure that we fully understand the connections between the rights and responsibilities we also created and played our own memory game.

Soon my students will face a challenge of presenting the book to their classroom peers and sharing their thinking. I hope they can also play the memory game with the mainstream students and elaborate on their ideas and thoughts about rights and responsibilities.

Our memory game that we created and played for the first time on Friday.

Grade 3 In Class Support

During our planning session, the Grade 3 homeroom teachers and I were discussing strategies for providing our students with opportunities to practice oral persuasive argument before they start working on their written one. We also wanted to encourage our students to use the language of persuasive argument. 

I put some ideas together and sent them to my colleagues. The plan was:

Persuasive Argument

Oral practice / Pair - Think - Create a Dialogue - Share

Collaborative learning: Students work in pairs.

Materials: The cards with images and sentence starters are handed out to each pair.

Task: Students think about the images and create persuasive dialogues, using persuasive language and the academic language of the unit.

Scaffold: Images, sentence starters, modeling strategy

Learning Outcome: Practice oral persuasive argument, practice the academic language of the unit, practice collaborative learning.

Collaborative teaching: alternative teaching

Miss Lisa chose to do this activity this week and all the students in her class had a very successful experience of collaborative learning and discussing children's rights. Miss Lisa changed the final task a little and asked her students to create a poster with the images that we prepared for them. Both Miss Lisa and I enjoyed our collaborative teaching during this class.

Miss Lisa helps the students to choose the images.

Ichiru and Yubin chose an image and were successfully using several persuasive sentence starters in their dialogue.