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.

GRADE 3 EAL IN CLASS SUPPORT

In Miss Erika's classroom this week we practiced three digit numbers addition and subtraction.
The children moved through various stations with maths activities. It was exciting to observe the choice of strategies that our students made as well as their well-developed collaborative skills.

All the children enjoyed their maths lesson.

Miss Lisa's Grade 3 students had a session with Miss Alison - our counselor. The children were offered to make a decision in a real-life situation, discuss consequences and share reasons for their opinions and choices. I supported our English learners and they all managed to understand the subject of the discussion and share their ideas. The moral values were discussed and the children made the connections between their values and the decisions they make.

All the student had to share their values with the rest of the class.

As Miss Anita continued working on her assessment of reading, our Grade 3 students and I explored the six various ways to start a story in an unusual way. First, the children shared their ideas of sizzling story starters. After the discussion, I taught our students how to start a story in six different ways. The children practiced starting the story with a dialogue, sound effects (onomatopoeia), a question, action lead, snapshot of a small moment and a flashback.
The next day Miss Anita's class had a session with our librarian Miss Rachel about sizzling story starters they were able to make connections to what they already knew.

All the children enjoyed listening to the book Miss Rachel read.

Grade 3 EFL Class

Summary Writing

In English as a Foreign language class, we read a story "The  Clever Monkey" and practiced writing a summary. First, we thought about the definition of summary and the purpose of summarising stories. The students shared their opinion on what was important in the story and what details they could skip. All the children were engaged in the word choice process. Our goal was to find the right words and construct 3 or 4 clear sentences about the story. 
During the discussion, all my students were successful in creating 3 - 4 essential sentences about the story. However, when I offered them to write the sentences down, several students produced a really detailed description of events.
I will start our next class with a sharing session and will guide my students towards the correct conclusions. We will have one more practice lesson, giving a chance to all my students to experience success.

G3 EAL In Class Support

This week our Grade 3 students began to create their stories.
In Miss Erika's and Miss Anita'sclassrooms, the children learned how to generate lists of characters and draw mindmaps of places for the stories. Our students enjoyed exploring their memories of long and not so long ago and discovering the special moments that triggered natural story flow. 

Colorful mindmaps helped our students to draft their stories.

Rich discussions in Miss Erika's classrooms.

Listening and reading various stories in Miss Anita's room.

All our students listened to various wonderful stories and had rich discussions about the features and elements that they can use in their own writing.

Several strategies were modeled for the students to upgrade their editing skills. A lesson about paragraphs took place in Miss Lisa's classroom. The children listened to the story The Boy Who Cried "Wolf!". After the students had a discussion about paragraphs, they had to assemble the story that was cut into paragraph strips and shared the results with a partner. When all the children completed the activity the reflection session took place. Our students had to share what they noticed and what they wondered about the story and while assembling the text. We also had a chance to remind our students about the story structure.

Vincent and his partner assembling the story.

All the mention above learning engagements had a common goal of unpacking the writing process for our students. Next week we will continue developing the writing skills of our Grade 3 English learners.