Sunday, September 14, 2013
ROUTINES PART I
It's been a few weeks in and routines have been established and the kids are doing great work. We are up to 23 students representing the following home languages: Spanish, French (including Hatian Creole), Russian, Tagalog, Urdu, Manike, (west african), Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, and Hindi. It's a great mix of kids with lots of different language and academic skills. Here are the routines established for the 90 minute class (twice a week, once a week it is 45 minutes)
1. Students enter, get their journals and write the heading of the class and the date and the target academic vocabulary word of the day
English through Drama
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
vocabulary:
feature
I then read the heading and begin talking and demonstrating my own understanding of the vocabulary word. The academic vocabulary word is something the entire school is committed to teaching across all subjects. These are high use, high frequency words that form the basis of academic skills, but are often not explicitly taught. All high achieving students will pick these words up without direct instruction. The premise is that we need to explicitly teach these words, especially to english language learners. I refer anyone interested to look at the work of Kate Kinsella, among others, to get a greater understanding of this concept.
After I talk (very simply and through a lot of gesture), I ask students to turn and talk to another student or a group of students, and come up with a sentence or two of what that word means to them.
I then circulate around working with the newest of the newcomers, but even in a class composed mostly of newcomers, I found that my explanation/demonstration has given access to the word for most.
I then write a few of the student definitions/understandings, and then write my own. All students copy at least one of the students (or use their own) and all copy mine.
then I explain the language goal of the day and then the drama goals and activities we will use to get at those language goals. I find that making this explicit really helps the kids see that all the drama activities we will do that day will, in fact, lead them to grow in their English skills.
all this takes about 10 minutes. Kids are speaking about 30% of the time, not enough if we are to use the percentage that most studies indicate are optimal for student growth in ELD instruction: 50%. So then next activities (routines) are designed to pump up the amount of guided student talk.
Next up is Routine number two--the drama game, "Yes, Let's"
ROUTINES PART I
It's been a few weeks in and routines have been established and the kids are doing great work. We are up to 23 students representing the following home languages: Spanish, French (including Hatian Creole), Russian, Tagalog, Urdu, Manike, (west african), Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, and Hindi. It's a great mix of kids with lots of different language and academic skills. Here are the routines established for the 90 minute class (twice a week, once a week it is 45 minutes)
1. Students enter, get their journals and write the heading of the class and the date and the target academic vocabulary word of the day
English through Drama
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
vocabulary:
feature
I then read the heading and begin talking and demonstrating my own understanding of the vocabulary word. The academic vocabulary word is something the entire school is committed to teaching across all subjects. These are high use, high frequency words that form the basis of academic skills, but are often not explicitly taught. All high achieving students will pick these words up without direct instruction. The premise is that we need to explicitly teach these words, especially to english language learners. I refer anyone interested to look at the work of Kate Kinsella, among others, to get a greater understanding of this concept.
After I talk (very simply and through a lot of gesture), I ask students to turn and talk to another student or a group of students, and come up with a sentence or two of what that word means to them.
I then circulate around working with the newest of the newcomers, but even in a class composed mostly of newcomers, I found that my explanation/demonstration has given access to the word for most.
I then write a few of the student definitions/understandings, and then write my own. All students copy at least one of the students (or use their own) and all copy mine.
then I explain the language goal of the day and then the drama goals and activities we will use to get at those language goals. I find that making this explicit really helps the kids see that all the drama activities we will do that day will, in fact, lead them to grow in their English skills.
all this takes about 10 minutes. Kids are speaking about 30% of the time, not enough if we are to use the percentage that most studies indicate are optimal for student growth in ELD instruction: 50%. So then next activities (routines) are designed to pump up the amount of guided student talk.
Next up is Routine number two--the drama game, "Yes, Let's"
No comments:
Post a Comment