EAL Grade 3 In Class Support

In all three Grade 3 classrooms we chose to focus on the oral persuasive argument at the beginning of this week.

In Miss Claire's and Miss Lisa's rooms the children watched a video about Indonesian children working on tobacco plantations.

Miss Claire's students took notes while watching the video.

In order to better understand the problems raised in the video, our students formed small (4 students) discussion groups. The teachers assigned roles for each child, a parent, a tobacco boss and an NGO worker, to every member of the group. Then all the "children", "parents", etc grouped up to discuss their arguments. After that, all the students returned to their small groups and started debating about rights and responsibilities.

Miss Lisa's class is warming up before the debate.

In Miss Michelle's class, the students had to think of a scenario that would illustrate a violation of children's rights and present a freeze frame. Pictures of the freeze frames were taken and printed out for the students to add speech balloons with their statements.

Samir, Moon Ju, Mia and Panaboth's freeze frame.

All the students enjoyed adding speech balloons to the photos of their freeze frames.

All the students were very engaged and found the activity interesting. In the end, three short debates took place and our students practiced arguing about child labor and discrimination.


EAL Grade 1 In Class Support

In Grade 1 we successfully resumed our reading rotations and continued our guided reading sessions.

Noel is making thoughtful predictions.

Reach, Somnang and Itthimun are making connections.

Our students also wrote a story about a fight with a friend and described their feelings.

We used the substitution table strategy when we wrote our story with Miss Carina's students.

Miss Rachelle's students finished their realistic fiction story drafts. The next step is to use the editing checklist and to revise the stories.

Riku was the first one to finish his draft.

Grade 3 EFL Class

The unit about children's rights is coming to the end. All our third graders have learned so much! I asked my ELL learners to reflect on the past six weeks, answer a couple of questions and share with the group what was the highlight of the unit for them. They had to express it in one sentence. My students mentioned the UN Convention of Children's Rights, various facts that they learned during our field trips and the guest speaker sessions.

Moon Ju wrote that she did not know that many children in the world did not have their rights and that she would like to help them.

Grade 3 In Class EAL Support

This week had an exciting beginning as our Grade 3 team began learning about homophones. I told my students that the word homophones came from the Greek language and homos means "same" and phone means "sound".

Our Students are listening to Miss Lisa introducing the concept of homophones.

Both in Miss Lisa's and in Miss Michelle's rooms we discussed homophones with our students and gave them a chance to practice using homophones. Our students had to complete sentences by choosing the correct word from the homophone pair. When all sentences were completed we discussed the challenging sentences and it turned out that several students learned several new words.

Next the students formed 4 small groups. Each group had a set of cards with homophone pairs. The task was to choose the most interesting pair from the pile and prepare a short mime skit for the rest of the class to guess what homophones they chose.

Xander's group is still choosing a pair of homophones to present.

In this group, the boys decided to present one pair of homophones and the girls chose a different pair.

When all the groups were ready we all came back to the carpet to enjoy the presentations. Some groups were more expressive than others and sometimes it was easy to guess and other times it was impossible. The children had a great chance to share their creativity in expressing their ideas through body language. One group came up with the idea of making a sign to support their presentation.

Making a sign was a great idea!

All our Grade 3 students were very engaged in this activity and enjoyed acting the words out and hopefully will remember the tricky concept of homophones.

Our Field Trip to CCF

The Highlight of the week was our field trip to CCF (Cambodian Children's Fund).
ISPP Grade 3 students had a chance to meet Khmer students from the CCF school and play math games with them.

After a tour around the CCF facilities, it was time for us to return to ISPP. All our students and teachers were greatly impressed with the amount of work the CCF does to ensure that Khmer children from the poorest families have their rights.

Our Group photo at the CCF school library.

Playing math games with cards.

Charly and KimVeng are taking the lead

Our "I Wonder" sessions went well as usual. Miss Claire's students were wondering about how to make soap and we learned a lot about this. 

I was extremely proud of Moon Ju from Miss Michelle's class. In my EFL class, I showed my students the video  "If the World Were One Village". Moon Ju learned from that video that many people in the world live without safe water and clean air. Today during the "I Wonder" time she made a thoughtful connection and asked me if we could learn more about how to save water and teach others to do the same. It was exciting to observe Moon Ju's growth as an inquirer and her ability to pursue the topic that she is interested in. 

Moon Ju is wondering how to save water.

Jennifer, Mollymoon and KimVeng learned how to make soap today.

EFL Grade 3 Class

In EFL my Grade 3 students were engaged in the activity where they were expected to read about one of the rights, and then learn facts about the violation of this right and reflect on whether they have this particular right or not. My students shared their perspectives on the advantages of ISPP, the importance of nutritious food and a balanced approach to using technology for learning and for fun.

Small group discussions.

Grade 1 In Class Support

In Grade 1, Miss Rachelle's students practiced creating a narrative story using the 6 box template. Prior to writing, we discussed the story structure and the importance of having a setting, characters, the problem and the solution.

Misuki, Riku, Viphou and Nao Nao took turns sharing their ideas about the plot and main events of the story. Peter who lived in Australia was our main character. The boys had great ideas for the problem and a very unexpected solution.

Next week we will reread and edit our story. As soon as we decide that it is all ready, we will publish it and create illustrations.

Creating stories with friends is fun!