Grade 1 In Class Support

In Grade 1 this week we were busy reading and writing stories. The "Wake Me Up in Spring" story by James Preller was the favourite this week. I was impressed with our Grade 1 ELLs! They continued to develop their comprehension skills and the "Wake Me Up In Spring" book gave all my students a lot of food for thought. Together we looked for clues and made our conclusions.We discussed how the main characters felt and explained our thinking. My students had to find the proof for their ideas and understanding in the story and share with the rest of the group. I modeled this strategy for them first and then all the students took turns sharing their thinking.

Another highlight of the week was the "Collections" book by Margeret Ballinger and Rachel Gosset.

We had an engaging discussion and googled the names of the birds and rocks that the students did not know. After reading and discussing the story, my students were asked to make connections to their lives and tell us about their collections or ideas for them. It was exciting to observe the great interest in the story that the children demonstrated.

Lucy enjoyed reading the book about collections and being a member of our reading group.

This week we welcomed Andres (a new student from Norway). We had a great session reading a story about Mr. Wolf's Dinner and taught each other English and Norwegian. It was fun!!

Learning from each other is fun!

Miss Carina's  students were writing their stories. Peter finished his realistic fiction book and started his fantasy fiction about an adventure on Mars.

We had a busy time publishing our stories.

In Miss Kelly's room lots of students were drafting their stories. I worked with Vincent and we managed to complete his draft. Vincent's story is about an adventure in the mountains.

Vincent was proud of his story draft.

Grade 3 In Class Support

We have learned a lot about the English language in Grade 3 this week.

In Miss Claire's room we talked about idioms and after watching a video the students attempted to construct their understanding of the idioms. They had to work in four collaborative groups and each group had native English speaking students to help the ELLs.

We also spent some time reading stories and practicing our inferencing skills in small groups. The discussions were very productive and the students further developed their reading comprehension skills.

Reading "Jamaica's Find" triggered interesting discussions.

Our students were engaged, curious and their predictions were interesting.

In Miss Lisa's room we began our landfill experiment and the students wrote their hypothesis.

In Miss Michelle's room we had a busy Tuesday learning about prefixes in four collaborative groups. All activities were successful and I am grateful to The Curriculum Corner for the ideas.

The sorting out activity was fun.

Drawing the meaning of the words triggered thinking and creativity.

Everybody enjoyed playing a memory game with Miss Boramey.

We also did some vocabulary work. Our students had to watch two videos and write out all the words that related to our unit - Earth's Resources. When the lists were ready, we had a group discussion and chose the most challenging words for the Stir the Class activity that we are planning to do next week.

EFL Class

The focus of this week in my EFL class was on listening skills. We listened to several podcasts about water pollution and answered the questions. It was not easy for my students to catch and process all the information only by listening. The students had pair-share time to discuss the story with their peers and pick up some information that they missed. At the end of the class, I gave my students the written text of the article and we had a chance to correct our mistakes and proofread our answers to the questions.

All my students were engaged in the activity.