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

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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.