Grade 3 EAL - In Class Support 

Character Traits

While musing over how to make our students use more adjectives in their writing, I decided to begin with a less challenging activity. Our students were offered to listen to a story about The Sneaky Rabbit, read the text of the story and highlight the adjectives. 

Next, we had a group discussion to help some students check their understanding of the adjectives and add some to the highlighted list. The children had a chance to share their thinking and argue about whether certain words were adjectives or not.

After selecting the adjectives in a group effort and talking about why they were chosen by the author, the students had to write an exposition about the story and use most of the adjectives we had focused on.

The task could be extended by asking the students to change the ending or even the characters.

The children were engaged and liked the story. When writing their stories the students were quiet and focused. The teaching team reminded the children to edit for punctuation, capitalization and the past tense. When the writing session was over, the students had to pair-share and provide the feedback. Listening to their peers helped the students to reflect on their work and enhance their list of adjectives.

Miss Lisa's class.

Grade 3 EAL Support

Encouraging your students to talk could be challenging especially if you are working with language learners. I would like to share a couple of successes here. In both cases my colleagues and I planned carefully, divided the classes into groups and provided clear instructions and highlighted the importance of sharing and exchanging ideas.


Experiments

This week Miss Lisa's students were enthusiastically exploring friction and applied force. 
The first session started with discussing the learning intentions and forming questions.

Miss Lisa talks about learning intentions.

Our students came up with thoughtful questions about frictional force and applied force. To think about the answers and explore the forces, the children were offered to experiment with objects and surfaces. 
The students formed collaborative groups and the active learning began. They had to apply some force to a toy car, a wooden wheel and a plastic reel on three various surfaces (carpet, floor and cloth). 

Experimenting with various surfaces.

Vincent, Benjamin and Nao Nao are discussing the data.

After collecting the data the students analyzed it and made conclusions.
It was exciting to observe our students learning together and asking each other questions hypothesizing and sharing their thinking about the results of experiments.


Learning About Area

Miss Erika's students got a task to use a certain number of manipulatives to build several rectangles and then measure their areas.

The students were working in small groups.

The children were discussing the outcomes and asking each other questions. At the end of the math class, it was time to share their thoughts and findings about the rectangles.


Supporting the EAL students during the science and math sessions I noticed that even the shy students chose to talk and were eager to share their conclusions with the classmates. Teachers became silent observers and assessors occasionally pushing the students' thinking and/or providing feedback. The students actively learned from each other driven by the authentic interest and united by the common goal. It was obvious that all the children got much more out of that class because they have to practice so many various skills.
At the end of such sessions, teachers often summarize for students the outcomes and make meaningful connections to the learning intentions formulated at the beginning of the class. I wonder how challenging it would be for our students to do it independently and evaluate their own learning.  

EAL Support Grade 3

After winter break we have started learning about forces and motion with our students. Last week on Friday all our Grade 3 students went on a field trip to a playground in the center of the city. The goal was to observe various forces at work, identify simple machines and have good fun.
The weather was great for the trip and our hour at the playground flew by in a wink of an eye. When we arrived back to school my EFL student had to solve a slide challenge. After watching a video about various slides, the children had to solve the problem of how to go faster down the slide without changing the slide itself.
We had a meaningful discussion and several children came up with great ideas. Pouring water, liquid soap or oil down the slide to lessen the friction were the best solutions. It was a very engaging lesson and the idea came from Mystery Science.

The swings were everyone's favourite fun!

Sean and his friend had a great learning experience pushing and pulling the playground equipment.