WIDA TESTING

Raingsey is doing her speaking and listening test.

The time came for us to do the end of the year WIDA EAL assessment.  We all celebrate the amazing progress our grade 3 students made.  My students tried their best to reach their learning goals and to develop their language skills. I am always fascinated with the magic that happens right before my eyes every time a new beginner starts learning English. The initial anxiety, the first words and phrases, the first easy books and then the first story and the first dialogue or discussion! It takes a lot of resilience and patience, determination and practice! However, the result is so impressive for the students themselves and for their families, friends and teachers - they begin to speak, read and write in English!

Julia is thinking and planning her story.

We will have one more week of testing and I really appreciate this time with my students when we can reflect on the academic year and make new plans.

G3 EFL CLASS - Paraphrasing 

I was moving around and supporting my students in their thinking.

Every unit our students have to do a lot of research for their projects. Today we practiced paraphrasing during our EFL class. 

Often the students are asked to paraphrase a paragraph. I noticed that it is almost always challenging for the EAL students.

To scaffold the task in the most effective way, I decided to focus on a sentence at a time.
I discussed our learning intention and success criteria for the class. We also discussed plagiarism and the consequences of it.

My students worked in four small groups.To differentiate the task I made sure that multiple copies of the non-fiction books were available in different reading levels appropriate for my students.

First, I modeled the activity for my students. I drew a T-chart and copied a sentence from the book with a fact that we were interested in. Next, we discussed the options for the words we decided to paraphrase. I crossed out the word in focus and wrote the synonym above. After we changed about 3 words in a sentence, my students read it and copied the new paraphrased sentence in the second column of the T-chart. 

Shintaro successfully completed the task without teacher's support.

After doing it together, I thought my students were ready to paraphrase independently. When somebody had a problem with finding a synonym, students discussed the options with various members of our EAL team. That is how the activity became collaborative in nature and the students enjoyed sharing their thinking and knowledge with each other.

Grade 3 EFL Class - Retelling

The skill of retelling is essential for our students, yet we do not often provide enough opportunities for the children to practice it. 

While planning for my classes I remembered that I have old tapes with great stories, that also come with the stories in book form. Today online read alouds are available and popular both with teachers and students but since I had the tapes I decided to use one of them. 

We began with listening to the story. The artistic narration with sound effects helped my students to imagine the events and the setting of the story, and as a result, understand the story better. It also made it easier for the students to remember the story.

After the first listening, I asked my students to fill in the Five W's Chart and retell the story to a partner, using the Five W's Chart as a planner and a scaffold.

Constanza successfully filled in her Five W's Chart.

Then we listened to the story once again and the books were also available for the students to read through. After the second listening, the children were able to add more details.

Constanza is rereading to pick up the details.

Finally, I asked a volunteer to retell the whole story in front of the class. The rest of the group listened carefully and was asked to give feedback. The first risk-taker did a really good job retelling but omitted several important details and that were picked up by the audience.

Yannis was a real risk-taker and did a good job retelling!

The second volunteer retold the story once again taking the feedback into consideration. The second retelling was more accurate.

Julia was the second reteller and she learned from Yannis's mistakes and her retelling was more accurate.

This way the students had several opportunities to practice retelling during one class, as well as give, receive and use feedback.