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.

Grade 3 EAL in Class Support

The highlight of the week was the "Ready, Set, Design" collaborative activity in Miss Lisa's classroom. The students worked in small groups and every team had a different challenge and a set of fastener items, surface items and structure items. The children were not allowed to use scissors and glue and had to design a prototype in 15 minutes. Next, they had to present their solution to the rest of the class and explain how it addresses the challenge.

Nao Nao, Sovanrich and Benjamin's challenge was to create a book holder out of several cardboard pieces, a couple of bottle brushes and a piece of metal foil.
The boys were lost at first. Later on, they tried several ideas and one of them worked. They were the first group ready with their model.
All three of them communicated effectively and exchanged various ideas, sharing their thinking and finally started to make the model, adding several changes on the way. It was exciting to observe our students being effective communicators, thinkers and supportive collaborators.

EAL Grade 3 Research

One of our learning intentions during Sharing the Planet Unit of Inquiry was to develop our students' research skills. Our Grade 3 English learners had various opportunities to practice looking for information, extracting the important bits from the text, paraphrasing and taking notes.

In Miss Lisa's classroom, the children were learning about various climate zones. They were offered to read the text about different climates, focus on keywords, paraphrase the important facts and use them in their own posters.

Miss Lisa gives instructions.

In Miss Anita's and Miss Lisa's rooms, several students chose to focus on the problem of food waste. They decided to interview our cafeteria chef to find out what happens to the food leftovers in ISPP. I supported these students while they were thinking of the interview questions. It was exciting to observe our third graders (several of them EAL students) confidently asking questions and taking notes when they heard the answers. Everyone in our group enjoyed this authentic learning experience. The children discovered some cool facts about our school and were eager to share their findings with the rest of their class.

Revising the questions before the interview.

EFL Grade 3 Class

In our EFL class, the children learned about the pollution of the ocean. We listened to several podcasts and watched a couple of videos ( video 1; video 2). I chose to practice note taking in the form of mindmaps. After a meaningful discussion, the children were ready to create persuasive posters. The students choose to persuade various audiences to help sea turtles to survive. As usually persuasive sentence frames were offered to our English language learners to support them.
The students enjoyed creating the posters in pairs or groups of three and presented the outcomes at the end of the class. The audience was very supportive and lots of positive feedback was provided.

Bravo Sean and Hyon Ung!

Chou chay and Riku did a good job!

Soyal, Oscar and Peter's presentation was a big success as well!

GRADE 3 EAL SUPPORT IN CLASS

Reader's Theatre was the highlight of this week in Miss Lisa's class. Several plays about recycling and environmental issues were offered to our students. The children worked in 5 groups of four and enthusiastically practiced reading with expression. It was exciting to observe the spontaneous discussions in the groups that happened during the reading practice. Our Grade 3 learners asked each other questions, made comments and practiced giving reasons for their opinions.

Our students worked in small groups.

Miss Lisa's students also enjoyed "I WONDER" session this week. "I WONDER" time gives our students a chance to pursue their own interests and enrich their knowledge about the matter of their choice. Most of Grade 3 students are interested in various fields of knowledge: some like to learn more about space and our Solar System, others are interested in animals and insects or various machines and robots that help people. The students are guided in the process of inquiry and research and are aware of the success criteria for the project. The outcome of the research can be presented as a slide show, a poster or a fact sharing session. The children may choose to present to the whole class or small group or not to present at all. The scaffolding in a form of sentence frames is offered to our students to support and structure their presentations or sharings.

Nao Nao collects information about our Solar System.

In Miss Anita's class, we continued to support our students in a quality opinion writing. The focus of this week was on "hooking" the audience. Various strategies for building connections with your audience were revised and discussed. The students shared their knowledge and discussed the language features remembered from the books they read. The importance of strong and thoughtful reasons with facts was highlighted by some children. 
After the discussion, the students were engaged in a collaborative thinking activity. They had to make a claim and support it with three strong reasons. The students worked in pairs and had to share and comment on the quality of reasons. I have prepared some card with claims, however, the children were allowed to come up with their own ideas.

Pair-sharing the claims and discussing the reasons.

Luie and her partner had opposite opinions on the same matter and had a great discussion.

GRADE 3 EFL CLASS

 To support the development of our students writing skills I thought of a small project for my G3 English language learners. I carefully chose stories for my students to read with reach language and patterns for them to explore. We read three stories in a week.

The next step for my students was to use the patterns in their own writing. Some scaffolding table cards were made to remind the children of the patterns we focused on.

Scaffolding table card

Another form of scaffolding was the picture story starters that were given to the students. That way they did not have to think about what to write and could start planning straight away. It was important as we had only 45 minutes for planning, writing and editing our written piece. My plan is to share the written pieces and explore how we can improve them as well as celebrate a successful story writing.