Grade 2 New Vocabulary in Class Support

This past week the Grade 2 classroom teachers and I collaboratively continued to introduce our students to new vocabulary of our unit about the urban environment and ways of modifying it. We also worked on unpacking the central idea with our children and on paraphrasing the challenging lexical features.

One of the successful vocabulary engagements was when our students had to mind map all the targeted vocabulary (and also just the words that they knew about the city environment). After that, they had to sort all the words from their mind maps into six categories - Infrastructure, recreational, services, cultural, religious, transportation. In some classes, the students worked with their mind maps, and in others, cards with the words were on the carpet for them to pick up and write them out under the correct category heading.

Sorriaj is busy sorting out his words.

Kim Veng is consulting with one of his friends.

Grade 2 - Urban Environment Vs. Rural Environment

Maly, Visal and Samir exchanged their ideas during the discussion
and easily created a poster. Great team work!

My Grade 2 EAL students began to work on their new unit about understanding urban environment and ways to improve it. I decided to start by supporting my students in constructing their own understanding of the new vocabulary. To introduce the concept of URBAN and RURAL in a fun way we watched a cartoon about the City Mouse and the Country Mouse and then had a "contrast and compare" group discussion. We also watched a video Urban Vs. Rural and once again discussed the differences of the city and the country lifestyles. After exposing my students to the new vocabulary and concepts I engaged them in their first practice of the new words. My grade 2 EAL students had to work with preselected images of urban and rural environments and cards with words. In small groups of three or four students they had to sort out the images and the words, create posters and collectively present their new understandings.

Most of my students completed all the tasks successfully and shared their presentations with the rest of the class. However, some of my kids were still not confident in their knowledge and failed to explain the difference between URBAN and RURAL.  My plan is to play language games and memory games during my EFL classes next week. Hopefully the games will give the students that were confused one more opportunity to listen to their peers explaining the meaning of the new words and have yet another chance to practice explaining it on their own.

Alicia, Jennifer and KimVeng are discussing and sorting out the images and cards with words for the poster.

Jennifer, Alicia and Kim Veng are sharing their understanding of the new words with the rest of the class.

Mollymoon, Sorriaj and Sak presenting their poster.

Vocabulary Activities in Grade 3

Recently my Grade 3 EAL students began to learn about waterways and were exposed to many new words. In order to help my students to construct their own understanding of the different parts of the river I decided to prepare cards with the words and their definitions and engage my students in small group discussions. Each group of three or four students discussed the words and then had to match the word cards with their definitions. Each group chose a reporter who had to share the group thinking and findings with the rest of the class. During this part of the session my students received guidance and corrected their mistakes. Finally all the students continued to work in groups and collaboratively created posters with words and drawings and successfully presented them to the rest of the class.

Thomas, Yubin and Sofia discussing the words, sharing the tasks and creating the poster.

Thomas, Sofia and Yubin are proud presenters and Minato is being a bit shy.

Jade, Dyna and Jan were creative, confident and a great team. Their presentation showed their deep understanding.

Grade 2 English as a Foreign Language Class

Today during our EFL class my Grade 2 students were discussing various art forms and how people express their perspectives through them. 

To begin with we all revised various art forms. Next we worked in 3 groups of 3 students. In each group students received cards with the art form names and their definitions. The students enthusiastically discussed the art forms sharing their own understandings of each one and matched the words and definitions. During the last unit of inquiry all second graders became more knowledgeable about how and why people create art and as a result they could confidently share their ideas and opinions. At the end of the discussion and sharing session I asked each student to draw a sketch about the art form that they worked with. Finally I chose a random student from each group of three to present their understanding of the art form to the rest of the class. For support the three presenters used their cards with words and definitions as well as their sketches while presenting.

It was challenging for some students to remain focused and listen to their peers during the sharing sessions. They enjoyed more when it was their turn to speak. With this in mind, for future activities I will have to give the students more opportunities to report what the others have said to encourage active listening. This can be done after watching videos, listening to songs or during pair share sessions.

We had a successful learning experience and an exciting class with my Grade 2 EAL learners! All of them were involved in meaningful dialogues, practiced their speaking, listening, thinking and social skills. The children asked questions, revised unit vocabulary and even had a mini presentation to finish with. All of it during one class of 45 minutes! Keep up the hard work Grade 2!

Mollymoon, Samir and Sak are in the middle of the sharing session.

Mally is matching her cards. She spoke about dancing.

Jennifer is presenting. She spoke about writing stories.

Grade 3 Summative Assessment.

My Grade 3 students finished learning about the solar system and how our planet's place in it affects our life.

One of my students, Minato, worked on making a model of the Earth and the Moon orbiting it. He wrote down facts that he learned about the Moon and the Earth and made cards that helped him to remember what he had to say when he presented these facts to us. This scaffold helped Minato present with greater confidence. Minato practiced speaking loudly and clearly. Being a full support EAL student, Minato managed to work on the same assessment as the rest of the class. Well done Minato!

Storytelling with Puppets

Thomas, YuBin and Sofia really enjoyed the session.

While working with my Grade 2 and 3 EAL beginners, I am always looking for various ways to motivate them. It is essential to engage my students in assignments that are meaningful and trigger their curiosity. The trick is to combine play and exploration and this time I decided to use puppets. We have several sets of puppets in our EAL elementary department; however, puppets that are created by the children themselves are the most popular. Depending on the time that is available, we can either use the old puppets created earlier (I always try to keep the best ones for the collection) or ask the children the make their own. It is not very time consuming and adds a lot to the process as all the students naturally try to talk and discuss their ideas, consult with each other, choose colors, collaborate and help each other. Even beginners with limited vocabulary and shy students (who are usually reluctant to talk) are highly motivated and become very creative and expressive.

During the last week before the break my students were tired and I chose this activity for all of us to have some fun together.

We started with reading a big book “Who Will Help?”, a version of the little red hen strory that most children are familiar with. It was an easy reading and everybody understood the plot; however, we also discussed the characters, setting and problem.

My students suggested to add some characters and we innovated the story a bit.

We made our puppets and read the story again, acting out some parts of the story. By that time all my students remembered all the events in the story and were ready to retell it without a book.

Thomas and Sofia were real risk-takers and chose to have two various parts.

We performed the story a couple of times swapping the puppets and had a lot of fun.

It was a successful learning experience because all my students even the most reluctant ones were motivated to participate and said their parts. Everybody liked  the lesson and we will definitely do it again.

Unit Vocabulary for EAL Learners

During the last couple of weeks I was teaching new unit vocabulary to my Grade 2 and Grade 3 EAL learners.

In Grade 3 we choose to create a version of an understanding map for the word UNIQUE. During the first session the students were asked what they thought the word UNIQUE meant. They had to draw what UNIQUE was for them. One of our G3 teachers Mrs.Claire Webster prepared a short video for our students to watch prior to the session. It was very helpful and guided their thinking. In the end of the session our Grade 3 students came up with a class definition of the word UNIQUE.

The next time we met, we continued to fill in our understanding map and talked about synonyms. Some students easily came up with the words RARE, DIFFERENT, UNUSUAL. For some students it was more challenging and I added words like SPECTACULAR and SPECIAL to their lists. Again the students had to explain using words and symbols what the word meant to them.

To consolidate the knowledge of the new word we had a discussion about our planet in my EAL class and the majority of my EAL students were able to use the words SPECIAL, UNIQUE, RARE while talking about Earth.

Students in Miss Lisa's class are presenting their understanding maps of the word UNIQUE

Yubin was proud to share her understanding map as well.

In Grade 2 we began to talk about perspective, imagination and art. Once again it was challenging for some of the students. To support my students in constructing their own meaning of more abstract words like PERSPECTIVE I prepared the following activities. First we discussed the images of the words and played the matching game (the students were supposed to match the card with the word and the card with the definition). Our students had to do it in groups and it was interesting to observe the process and to listen to their discussion that took place during the game.

Next they had to work with true/false statement with the new vocabulary and completed a cloze activity. Finally during the second session the students were ready to begin working with personal dictionaries were they had to show their understanding of the word by writing the definition with their own words, creating a symbol for the word and use the word in their own sentence.