Book Character Day

On Wednesday all the students and teachers in elementary school dressed up as their favourite book characters. The day was full of fun activities and in my EFL class we read a story about my character. 

When I came to school dressed as a milkmaid lots of my students asked me who I was as it wasn’t easy for them to guess. During my EFL class I read a fable about The Milkmaid and Her Pail and we also watched a short video. Before, during and after reading we practiced comprehension strategies. My students had an opportunity to predict, connect, question, summarize, think about the character and create a written story map.

We also had a discussion about the lesson of the story.

It was clear that all my students enjoyed the class and the story.

Working with Beginners

At the end of the day on Wednesday, Thomas from Miss Michelle’s class and I were working on creating a little speech for Thomas’s child character puppet. Thomas wrote down some ideas and used the passport that he had issued for the child character calling him Jack Moon.  We practiced presenting and made this video.

After watching the video together, Thomas realized that he needed to speak louder and hopefully will do it when he has his final presentation in Miss Michelle class later this week.

The Grade 3 students in Miss Claire's class were creating poems on Friday. Minato wrote a poem about what he saw on the way to school. I reminded Minato to use descriptive language and Minato began to think about the color and sizes of the things he saw.

At the end of the session Minato was proud of his poem.

EFL Grade 2 Classes this Week

This was a busy week or our Grade 2 students and teachers as we had several field trips and learned a lot about the Cambodian past.  In my EFL class I decided to talk more about the concept of change and refresh my students’ knowledge about Cambodian culture and traditions. My students were offered to work with a partner and to create a poster about Khmer food, climate, houses, transport, language, etc.

They used the learning text and the images that were printed out in advance. After the poster was completed the children had to practice presenting the information to the rest of the group. It was interesting to observe how my students worked in pairs and shared the roles when getting ready for the final presentation. 

Children are busy practicing their presentations.

At the end of the class boys and girls began presenting. The first 3 pairs were very successful and the audience was able to state the new facts they learned after each presentation. We will continue our presentations next week.

Guilia and YiLei are speaking about Khmer food.

Maly and Mollymoon are speaking about the Cambodian climate and teaching us that rains that we have in Cambodia are called monsoons.

“Generate – Sort – Connect – Challenge” Visible thinking Routine

EFL G3 – Children’s Rights

At the beginning of the unit we had a discussion with my G3 EAL learners about children’s rights. During the first week of the unit we read several easy books related to the topic and later I wanted my students to focus on certain parts of the stories and select ideas related to children’s rights.

Being aware of the complexity of the concept for my students, I decided to introduce the visible thinking routine called “Generate –Sort – Connect – Challenge”. The routine should help my students to construct their understanding step by step and provide more opportunities for talking and sharing with their mainstream peers.

After reading several books (as well as materials shared with me by the classroom teachers) the first step for us was to generate the list of children's rights that we thought we would like to focus on. We also talked about the responsibilities that go together with rights.

For the next class I prepared cards with rights and cards with responsibilities. My students worked in 3 groups sorting the cards and matching the rights to the responsibilities.

Dyna was proud to read his page and share his illustrations.

Thomas is reading his page of the book.

The next step was to make personal connections. I asked the children to illustrate each pair of rights and responsibilities and we created a big book.  In order to make sure that we fully understand the connections between the rights and responsibilities we also created and played our own memory game.

Soon my students will face a challenge of presenting the book to their classroom peers and sharing their thinking. I hope they can also play the memory game with the mainstream students and elaborate on their ideas and thoughts about rights and responsibilities.

Our memory game that we created and played for the first time on Friday.

Grade 3 In Class Support

During our planning session, the Grade 3 homeroom teachers and I were discussing strategies for providing our students with opportunities to practice oral persuasive argument before they start working on their written one. We also wanted to encourage our students to use the language of persuasive argument. 

I put some ideas together and sent them to my colleagues. The plan was:

Persuasive Argument

Oral practice / Pair - Think - Create a Dialogue - Share

Collaborative learning: Students work in pairs.

Materials: The cards with images and sentence starters are handed out to each pair.

Task: Students think about the images and create persuasive dialogues, using persuasive language and the academic language of the unit.

Scaffold: Images, sentence starters, modeling strategy

Learning Outcome: Practice oral persuasive argument, practice the academic language of the unit, practice collaborative learning.

Collaborative teaching: alternative teaching

Miss Lisa chose to do this activity this week and all the students in her class had a very successful experience of collaborative learning and discussing children's rights. Miss Lisa changed the final task a little and asked her students to create a poster with the images that we prepared for them. Both Miss Lisa and I enjoyed our collaborative teaching during this class.

Miss Lisa helps the students to choose the images.

Ichiru and Yubin chose an image and were successfully using several persuasive sentence starters in their dialogue.

EAL Beginners

In January we welcomed several new students to ISPP and once again started making our first steps in developing their English language skills. Our new Grade 2 student from Korea, Hailey, receives in class support during unit time. Miss Courtney and I try to help Hailey in constructing her understanding of the unit concepts and building up her academic language of the unit. I often use brief one on one sessions for meeting Hailey's individual language needs. I provide an opportunity for students like Hailey to begin speaking English in context. However, it is important that the context is within the zone of my student's proximal development.

In this video Hailey practices speaking about her family.

Another one of my beginner students in Grade 3 is also from Korea. Yubin has been learning English since last year. Yubin likes to read in English and enjoys participating in our Home Reading Program. Yubin takes books home and after reading the story answers questions to show her comprehension and make connections.

In the video Yubin shares her thinking about the book that she liked.

Grade 2 and 3 In Class Support

During this week I was supporting my G3 ELLs in creating their stories. Our students had to choose a fairytale and change the characters, setting or even the plot.  My classroom colleagues chose the "easy reader" books for our full support EAL students.  I read it with my students checking their comprehension along the way.

We briefly revised the story structure, talking about what makes the beginning, middle and end of a story.

After the draft was ready we began to write.  The EAL students used their editing cards and iPads to check their spelling.  When the draft was ready we reread it to make sure all parts were there and everything made sense. 

Finally the EAL students were ready to begin the publishing process.

Yubin was proud of her story about the 3 little pigs and the tiger.

I suggested to my G2 colleagues to practice a visible thinking routine called the Explanation Game. Several artifacts were placed on the tables and all the children had to work in groups discussing the objects, sharing their thinking about what they were and what they were used for. All the students had an opportunity to talk to their peers. It was a great learning experience for ELLs as they had a chance to participate in meaningful discussions with their peers of various language ability and knowledge. It was interesting to observe the exchanges of knowledge between the kids during this activity. All students benefited from it as it was yet another practice of the academic language of the unit.

Jennifer and Sak shared their thinking about an ancient necklace.

Alicia and others listened enthusiastically to George as he was explaining why he thought his artifact was from Mexico.

EFL Time

After a brief idea exchange with the Grade 2 teachers I decided to work more on the concepts of the unit to provide more time for my students to construct their understanding of the new vocabulary and to have an opportunity to apply it.

The story about Maria Martinez (Maria Montoya Martinez was a Native American artist who created internationally known pottery. She examined traditional Pueblo pottery styles.)

triggered my students’ interest, and watching a video allowed the children to see Maria making pottery. After learning about pueblo artifacts and ancient traditions we talked about who taught Maria to make pottery. The students had to think about what they learned from their families.

In Class Support Grade 2

During this week my homeroom colleagues and I continued to focus on the concepts of our new unit of inquiry “Clues from the Past”.

To trigger the discussion of memories and to support our students in a challenging process of constructing their understanding, I suggested to use the famous story by Mem Fox “Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge”. In some classes I led the activity and in others we chose the parallel teaching model.

We listened to the story and had a discussion of what a memory is. After the discussion our students had to think and explain in writing what memories are for them.

I was supporting Alicia and Hailey in Ms.Courtney class during this activity.

Hello everyone and Happy New Year!

It was great to see all my students happy and relaxed after the holidays.

During our EFL classes this week my Grade 2 students began to think and discuss the concept of change. To support them during this process I prepared pictures of various phones - from the very first ones up to the smartphones.  The task was to look at the pictures in groups. After a meaningful discussion my students had to paste pictures of the phones in the correct order from the oldest to  the most modern ones. Then each group had to choose a presenter and share their thinking with the rest of the class providing reasons for their opinions.

After the heated discussions I was surprised to see that only  one group managed to complete the task without mistakes.

The other two groups were guided by their peers during the presentations and corrected their mistakes.

In the end we all talked about change again and made personal connections. It was a fun activity to do and it was not as easy as I thought it would be.

Samir is presenting the result of his group work.

During our EFL classes this week with the Grade 3 students we discussed the concept of needs and wants. All the students had to discuss what makes them healthy and happy and then draw as many of those things/places/people as possible. The next step for us was to stick the cards with needs on one poster and the cards with wants – on the other.  My students felt very enthusiastic about the activity and shared their explanations and reasons with their peers.  We had to agree about each item before sticking it on the poster.

I was surprised to see that mostly students drew food. It seemed to be challenging for some students to apply critical thinking skills and compare, categorize and rank independently.

Jade, Sofia, Thida and Mahin worked enthusiastically drawing their needs and wants

Boys also tried hard and Miss Kim was supporting Minato and Thomas.