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.