Grade 3 In Class Support

Our Grade 3 students continued exploring children's rights with the help of our teachers and guest speakers. On Tuesday Miss Sara ( Samir's Mom) from Winrock International delivered an informative presentation about child labour in Cambodia. 

Miss Sara is talking about child labour.

In Miss Michelle's class, we continued discussing child labour. We watched a powerful video and read an article about the Indonesian child workers that are harvesting tobacco leaves. All our students were shocked to learn about the horrible conditions the small children work in. They also learned about the consequences of nicotine poisoning. After watching the video we read the article in four small groups, highlighting the key words and discussing the unfamiliar language.

Some words were hard but we understood the main idea.

At the end of the class, we had a sharing session and the children reflected on the video and article and made thoughtful connections.

We also discussed what children's rights were violated in the video.

Later in the week, Miss Jan from the Thabita NGO came to talk to the students about the rights of women in Cambodia. Miss Jan also talked about how her NGO helps the poor families to start new better lives.

Miss Jan has been helping Cambodian people for more than 20 years.

In Miss Claire's class we practiced making three different types of connections (text to text; text to self and text to the world). The students worked in 4 small groups and each group read a different text before we began to make connections. I chose to read "Thunder Cake" by Patricia Polacco. Both Miss Claire and I prepared some cards with various sentence starters to scaffold the writing of the connections for our students. My students liked the story and they naturally began to talk about their grandmothers and their fears that they managed to overcome.

Kim Veng, Mollymoon and Jennifer using the cards with sentence starters.

Grade 1 In Class Support

Miss Rachelle's Grade 1 students had to create poems about their feelings and emotions. In our group, we thought about what we do when we are happy. We talked about how we move, what facial expressions we have and what thoughts we have in our heads when we feel happy and excited. Making connections and discussing the students' experiences made it easier for the children to use a lot of action verbs and create wonderful poems.
We also talked to our Grade 1 students about realistic fiction. We read a story book "Clancy and Millie and a Very Fine House". The students in my group practiced making connections to their life and that helped them develop their understanding of the features of realistic fiction.

We discussed the characters, setting, problem and solution of the story.

After practicing the discussion in small groups we returned to the classroom and shared our findings with members of other small groups that read different stories.

Eira, Misuki and William retold their stories to each other.

In Miss Carina's room, our students had to create poems about colors. The small group of students I worked with had lots of fun sharing ideas and thinking of rhyming words.
Yun Jae created two poems about blue and about brown. Here is one of them:

What is brown?
The snake is brown.
It is the King of the snakes 
And it hangs from the tree branch upside down.

Yun Jae was proud of his poem.

In Miss Kelly's room, we read a book about growing plants. Before reading, the students made predictions about the book and discussed whether it was fiction or non-fiction. After reading the book the children practiced creating a flow chart with the steps for growing herds. We revised the importance of capitalization and punctuation when we were proofreading our flow charts.

All students made thoughtful predictions.

Grade 3 EFL Class

All through this week, my ELLs continued discussing children's rights. They were involved in a comprehension activity about being bullied. After reading the text and completing the tasks, my students discussed the mistakes of the boy that was bullied in the story. They also made connections to their own background experience and shared their ideas for solving the problem. 

In order to further develop my students' speaking and listening skills, I used cards with short scenarios of children's problems. My students took turns reading the cards and then shared their perspectives on the described situations. 

BB is reading his card to the rest of the group.

Grade 3 In Class Support

Our Grade 3 students continue learning about Children's Rights.  This week was full of various learning experiences, fun activities and visits of guest speakers.

In Miss Lisa's class we helped our ELLs to unpack the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. We talked about the agreement between the countries to implement the convention. We also began discussing the articles of the convention.

We are learning about our rights!

In Miss Michelle's class we had a great team of talented poets who created acrostics, 5 senses poems and rhyming poems about our needs and wants.

Creating poems is fun!

Miss Michelle's students are sharing their poems with the rest of the class.

In Miss Claire's class the students focused on writing about imaginary children, describing their family, life style, age, culture, nationality, likes and dislikes and of course their rights.

Ms. Tracy from CCF invited our students to come visit the CCF elementary school.

Guest speakers from Save the Children, Friends International and the Cambodian Children's Fund delivered great presentations, shared a lot of information and helped our students to construct their understanding of the issues related to children's rights in Cambodia.

We learned a lot during the Friends International presentation.

Mr. Nelson from Save the Children taught us about children's rights.

Grade 1 In Class Support

All this week we continued assessing our students' reading skills and are really impressed with the results.

Maly made great progress!

English as a Foreign Language in Grade 3

After watching a video about rights and responsibilities my students had to reflect on all the information about children's rights they got so far and make a list of rights. I supported their thinking by writing their ideas on the board and the list was getting longer and longer. After their lists were completed we compared them with the UN Convention list of Child's Rights. It was exciting to observe that my students remembered the most important articles of the Convention. This activity also helped the students realize how many rights they are privileged to enjoy.

Grade 3 In Class Support

In Miss Lisa's class we started the new semester with the Color Symbol Image thinking routine. Our students had to think about themselves as learners. All the children were fully engaged in creating their posters. Soon it was time to share and the boys and girls took turns explaining their thinking and making it visible. Lots of original ideas and symbols were shared and discussed. It was interesting for me to listen to the students' perception of their learning styles and strategies.

It was a great sharing session and even the EAL students felt very confident

Miss Michelle's class was busy writing a recount about their holidays. Moon Ju was writing about her trip to Siem Reap and I helped her with some wording and sentence structure. We also used Google translate to clarify the meaning of some English words and translate them into Korean.

During the second session in Miss Michelle's class the students had to face the challenge of selecting 20 items to take with them on a hot air balloon. The objects had to help them survive a long journey. After a heated discussion the 20 items were selected, only to find out that we had to get rid of 15 of them and keep only the 5 most important ones. Our students were supposed to start thinking about their needs and wants with the help of this activity.

Moon Ju came up with several great ideas and suggested to her team to take a medical kit with them.

In Miss Claire's room we had our usual guided reading session. Kim Veng, Mollymoon, Jennifer and Sanita had a lot of fun reading "Dragon with A Cold".  We discussed some of the figurative language to make sure my students understood every detail of the story. We also talked about what we learned from the story and it was interesting to hear the various useful lessons that they picked up.

Grade 1 In Class Support

Throughout the first week we were busy assessing our Grade 1 students. The students made great progress in their reading and the teachers need to regroup them to form new ability groups.

Arun was very a confident  reader during the assessment.

Grade 3 EFL Class

I have started discussing rights and responsibilities with my Grade 3 students. We reread the "Turkey Girl" story and made connections to our responsibilities at home.  The students shared their thinking about what happens when we neglect our responsibilities.

I also thought it would be beneficial for my students to revisit some editing strategies. We completed the "Revise Your Writing" comprehension activity and tried to apply the revised strategies.

Samir applied the editing strategies and corrected some of his spelling and punctuation.