In Class EAL Support in Grade 1

The highlight of this week in Grade 1 was definitely the provocation for the "Weather" unit.
After a lot of team planning, stations were set up with various activities and learning experiences for the children to become curious about weather.

At each station our students had to focus on listening, speaking, seeing, and feeling to emphasize a sensory experience, emotional reaction and cognitive intention. The hot room, the cold room, watching the clouds - all these experiences triggered our students' thinking about the concepts and ideas of the unit.

At my station the children listened to a story by Verna Aardema " Bringing the Rain to the Kapiti Plain."

I believe our provocation activities today were simple yet powerful and hopefully would leave a lasting impression on our students and support them in making connections to their learning.

Our G1 students were great listeners and made thoughtful comments after the story.

Grade 3 In Class EALL Suport

In Grade 3 we have started our next unit of inquiry about our solar system. We are in the tuning in stage where the classroom teachers and I are gathering data about our students' current thinking, knowledge, feeling and understanding. It is also important to support the children in making connections with the key concepts and motivating them.

As each unit has its own set of vocabulary, we decided to focus on the word UNIQUE within the Solar System Unit. In all three classrooms we chose to do the understanding map about the word UNIQUE. My colleagues and I were hoping that it will lead to expanding students' thinking later and such concepts as uniqueness of each human being, our planet and our universe will be discussed by our students.

To engage the students we started our lessons with a powerful video about our planet. After watching the video I asked the students to come up with describing words about our Earth. Eventually the word UNIQUE was said by one of the students and then we began our cooperative learning activity. We decided to involve our students in a sitting variation of Stir the Class activity. After completing individual understanding maps our students shared their thinking with their peers in the small groups. Next a person from each group had to join another group and share again.

In different classrooms the definition was revealed at various times during the activity. Lots of synonyms were "discovered" and thoughtful and unexpected connections were made during this activity. My ELLs were practicing speaking, listening and thinking in mixed ability groups and felt pretty confident.

We also had lots of fun learning about how the word UNIQUE sounds and what it looks like in the mother tongues of our students. We googled the word UNIQUE in German, Khmer, Korean, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Spanish, Bengali, Japanese and even in Arabic for Kahal.

We all enjoyed the class and learned a lot.

Miss Lisa's students made lots of thoughtful connections.

All my ELLs worked confidently in mixed ability groups.

Miss Michelle's students were very engaged in our discussion.

Grade 1In Class Support

All this week we continued to assess our Grade 1 students in reading. It was a valuable experience for me as a support teacher and I learned more about each child.

It is necessary to design literacy instruction to meet the individual needs of each student. We carried out the reading assessment to identify skills that need review, to monitor our students' progress and determine their individual needs. The assessment results will guide our instruction and placement of our students within reading groups.

Samnang reads very well!

Grade 3 In Class Support

Our Grade 3 students are practicing the ISA test this week. The ISA assessment program is designed specifically for students in international schools in Grades 3–10. It is based on the internationally endorsed reading, mathematical literacy and scientific literacy frameworks of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). 

Our students practice the ISA test to prepare themselves and show their best thinking abilities during the final assessment at the end of September.

All my EAL students will be tested and our teachers and parents will receive lots of data that will help us to better meet our students' individual needs and further improve our instruction.

As part of the unit studies and preparation for the ISA assessment the Grade 3 children practiced debates and giving reasons for their opinions.

Maly and Haily in Miss Lisa's class enjoyed debating and were very creative when thinking about the support reasons.

We had a heated debate about cats and dogs in Miss Michelle's room

Grade 3 EFL Class

Persuasive argument is our genre of the current unit and it is also part of preparation for the ISA test. My G3 ELLs were enthusiastically involved in various activities and carried out several writing tasks related to persuasive arguments. The tasks supported my students in constructing their understanding of what persuasive argument is and how to create one in writing.

First we practiced giving reasons to support opinions. We played oral language games and completed writing worksheets. At the beginning of each class we developed our ability to come up with several reasons and think quickly. Here is the worksheet that I chose for this activity.

In the middle of the week we were ready to write a paragraph supporting our opinion with one introductory sentence and three good reasons (template). To scaffold this task for my ELLs, I introduced the opinion sentence starters, transition phrases and a checklist.

On Friday I wanted to get my students up and moving around while practicing supporting opinions. Using the Sort Out activity I prepared three sets of opinions and supporting reasons.

My students collaborated in three small groups matching the opinions and the reasons. Each group presented their poster at the end of the class and we had a discussion.

Samir was leading the sorting out activity.

Lots of learning and thinking took place.

Grade 1 In Class Support

This week I helped my Grade 1 homeroom teachers carry out the reading assessments of our students. 

Viphou read very well and was proud of his achievements.

Grade 3 in Class Support

I had to support various activities in three different classrooms this week. In Miss Lisa's room our students presented their persuasive argument project and practiced writing a well-structured persuasive writing piece.

Maly is persuading all of us to visit an imagined planet.

Miss Michelle's class enthusiastically participated in summative assessment.  All students had fun creating towers and cooperating with our peers. It was exciting to observe the creative team work and discussions.

Moon Ju created her tower in collaboration with Sorriaj and Tashi.

In Miss Claire's room we read a story and had a discussion about the characters, setting, problem and solution. Each student shared his/her thinking about the story in a small group and talked about what they learned.

Kim Veng shared a lot of ideas with our group.

Grade 3 EFL Class

In my EFL class my students practiced coming up with reasons for opinions. We completed a worksheet and played a game. One of the students shared an opinion and then everyone else had to come up with a reason to support this opinion. The student who could not come up with a reason, had to share a new statement, and the game went on.

We all enjoyed the game.

Grade 3 EAL Support

All my Grade 3 ELLs had to focus on practicing writing their persuasive argument piece. In all three classrooms the homeroom teachers and I prepared a lot of prewriting activities for our students. With the help of videos and songs we introduced the structure of the persuasive argument:

·       Both sides of the argument

·       Clearly stated opinions

·       Reasons for holding that opinion

·       Examples to support the reasons

·       Alternative view

·       Conclusions that are restated with enthusiasm

Our students had to practice oral debates, give various reasons for their opinion and share their thinking with the rest of the class. To scaffold the debates and persuasive writing I used opinion words and phrases  as sentence starters and introduced easy - to - read opinion pieces.

In Miss Lisa's  and Miss Michelle's classrooms we practiced giving reasons for opinions and again used our decision wheel while playing this game.

Final sharing of challenges the students had to face and decisions they had to make.

In my EFL class I supported my students in constructing their understanding of the persuasive argument and gave them time to practice providing reasons for their opinions. 

Samir shared his reasons for liking pizza.

It has also complemented the development of reading comprehension skills. We had practiced always supporting stated opinions with evidence from the texts of the stories.

After discussing with their partners the pros and cons of whether wild animals should be performing in the circus, my class took sides. With students divided into two groups, they took part in a spirited  Visible Thinking  debate called Tug of War .

Grade 1 In Class Support

Our students had a great week cooperatively developing their reading and comprehension skills in Grade 1. 

We read a book about moods and feelings with Miss Corey's class. After reading the story the students shared how they felt that day and continued creating  mini-books about their feelings.

In Miss Kelly's room we had a very productive home reading session. The students were supposed to reread to me the book that they had read at home and then choose a new one. It was exciting to listen to young readers and have brief conversations about the the characters, favourite parts, illustrations, etc.

After the books were read the children had to practice the word and spelling tasks related to their readings.

One of the tasks was to read "in their minds".

In Miss Rachelle's room we continued reading in groups. We used our mind maps that we created last week to scaffold the retelling of the story from last week. After that we reread the story and talked about the main character and other characters. I asked the children to choose their favourite character and explain their choice to me.

Miss Rachelle's boys felt very enthusiastic about our reading session.

Grade 1 In Class Support

We had a busy week in all three Grade 1 classrooms.

In Miss Rachelle's room we were testing our students and doing some reading activities. With my groups I read a big book "All Through the Week with Cat and Dog". I chose this book to revise the days of the week. After reading and discussing the book we played a memory game. All the students had a great time and were very enthusiastic about the story and made interesting connections.

We also read a book about after school activities and discussed what the children like to do after school. Working in small groups of 4-5 students gave each student a chance to share their ideas and opinions. 

I also used this time to give my grade one students a mini lesson  and talked to them about books with information (non-fiction) and books with stories (fiction). We shared our ideas about how we interact when we discuss stories. We practiced giving reasons for our opinions and listening actively to our peers. 

Miss Rachelle's students are discussing the story.

In Miss Carina's class I supported young writers. It was exciting to see how Miss Carina's students were experimenting with words, while attempting to explain why they like to do certain activities.

Kasper took time editing his writing and correcting his mistakes.

In Miss Kelly's class I observed lots of happy learners being very engaged in cooperative learning. The children had to work with partners and create faces with various facial expressions (happy, tired, sleepy, angry, surprised, etc.) out of play dough. When the face was ready they had to share with the teacher. The children were very creative and were making tears to go on a sad face and wrinkles to go on an old face.

Miss Kelly's students enjoyed this creative activity.

Grade 3 in Class Support

All my Grade 3  EELs practiced reading and thinking about the text this week. My students employed various reading strategies such as look back through the text; identify what the difficulty is; etc in order to complete the comprehension assignment prepared by the 
classroom reacher.

It was Jennifer's turn to read during our guided reading session.

When it was writing time Miss Claire's students were learning about speech marks and direct speech. 

It was raining the day before and all the paths in ISPP were full of creepy crawlers. 
Miss Claire thought it would be a good trigger for our kids' imagination and asked our students to create a dialog between a worm and a centipede. Needless to say the students had to practice using speech marks.
The plan worked and Mollymoon and KimVeng eagerly imagined the creatures and came up with a dialogue.

We all had lots of fun creating dialogues!

Grade 3 EFL Class

All this week we talked about our home reading programme with my Grade 3 ELLs. We discussed the importance of reading in their languages and in English. Together we shared strategies that my students employed to construct the meaning of the language and understand the main idea of the story. We read a Chinese story and I modeled thinking about the story and answering questions. I hope that after this session it will be easier for my students to create their home reading written responses independently.