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.