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.