In Class Suport

Mollymoon, Maly, Alicia, Hailey and Sonita had great time reading and  discussing gravity.

My Grade 2 EAL students continued exploring the world of simple machines. We started the week with a field trip to a playground. The children talked a lot about the simple machines that they saw (or thought that they saw) at the playground. They were exchanging their guesses, experiences and ideas. Lots of active listening occurred as the students were genuinely interested in the subject of discussion and exchanged their background knowledge eagerly.

We also continued our guided reading sessions with small groups of grade 2 students. Because of the nature of the unit we read a lot of non-fiction books about simple machines. In Miss Courtney's class we had an interesting discussion about gravity and thought about why gravity is important and what helps us to overcome it.

In Grade 3 we were busy discussing the new vocabulary and practicing procedure writing this week. Our team chose the Stir - the - Class activity to begin the vocabulary discussion.
In every class our students worked in five groups and each group had an image and a definition to talk about. Students practiced sharing their background knowledge, their guesses, and thoughts in general about the word in focus. After 5-7 minutes one student left his/her group and joined the next one. That gave students multiple opportunities to talk about the words. Unavoidably our Grade 3 students had to be repetitive and had to be an effective communicator and active listener and practice over and over again. We all enjoyed the activity and our real challenge was discussing nuclear energy because of the complexity of the process.

Miss Claire's students were enthusiastic thinkers!

Miss Lisa's students learned a lot from each other.

In Miss Michelle's class we have a lot of effective communicators.

EFL Classes

While learning about simple machines with my Grade 2 ELLs we watched several videos during this week and completed several comprehension activities. We went over the concept of function again and again to ensure the deep understanding of simple machines that we have discussed so far. We worked in pairs and small groups, asking and trying to find the answers to the questions: What is an inclined plane (or wedge, screw, etc)? How does it work? How this simple machine is used? What does this simple machine helps us do?

It was exciting to observe my students making their own"discoveries", learning that a screw is a wedge with an inclined plane wrapped around it. 

Maly and Molymoon learned that an inclined plane is made of two wedges.

In Grade 3 we continued learning about procedure writing. At the beginning of the week I modeled a short procedure writing exercise for my group. We watched videos about how things are made and read books about it. Next it was time for guided procedure writing. I prepared a text about paper making for my students and asked them to use one color to highlight the material we need to make paper and another color to highlight the steps that should be followed. We filled in the text organizer for procedure writing with words and phrases.

Finally my students had to write the final procedure of how to make paper, using their text organizers, forming sentences and adding time connectives to sequence the steps.

Yubin was the first one to complete the task!