Writing with ELLs

This week was a doozy in the worlds of education and health. March 2020 will be remembered in the annals of history as that time the Coronavirus became a pandemic. Schools all over North America were being closed -- here in Ontario it was the two weeks following the March Break, in order to limit exposure and force quarantine of travellers. I don't know who may have been travelling, as international travel was banned... but you never know when you've come in contact with someone who was in contact with someone who was in contact with someone who... and so on.
The education sector in Ontario has been fighting a nasty cold -- aka bargaining with the Provincial Government over a new contract. After weeks of service withdrawal, full strikes and picketing, bargaining in the media (government), running negative spin toward teachers (government again), and lots of stress, the Catholic union managed to get a tentative agreement. Our public schools are still a mess, and we're not sure this announcement is good news or not.

However, we've been working away in my little corner of the world! I had success with my junior students who used the Picture Word Inductive Model to co-write a short story. We used a photo to build a bank of nouns, adjectives and verbs after giving it a working title: Fishing Day.

Once we had a good list of words to work with, students wrote their own stories in their notebooks. To follow the procedure more accurately, I would have completed this step as a shared writing activity, as one of my learners was unable to do this independently. I was away, and you know how it goes sometimes. 

So, what to do next?

I had one of my students dictate her story to me and I wrote it out on the chart paper. I felt this would be similar to a co-write... right?

I talked to the group about finding sentences that tell about the where and the when of the story: the setting. I asked them to find and circle any sentence or part of a sentence with those pieces in green marker and I rewrote them in a list on another chart paper as they dictated them to me:

We read them over. Gee, they were sounding repetitive. Which word gives new information in each sentence? Hmm... the adjectives! Can we add them to one sentence? Sure can! We deleted the unnecessary details and mined the gems to add to the story. The bottom of the page shows the rewritten introduction with details about the setting, along with an introduction of our main characters, who do not get names until later. Here we had mini-lessons on revision, maintaining verb tense, and the order of adjectives! 

Next up: the story.

This image shows a big part of the process. Up to this point, we had written the introduction. This was several days later. 

We wrote out the sentences that really didn't have too much to do with the introductory setting. After reading it aloud together, we realized it seemed disjointed. The first sentence to pop out? "They are happy." The kids knew that happiness is a result of something, and in our story, nothing had happened yet. We decided to move it to the end of the story. 

Then we tackled the time order of the story, and added some dialogue. We also realized that saying, "the man and his son" or "the dad and his child" were vague. After some discussion about using names of famous characters and people as not appropriate for this story (no, John Cena is not an appropriate name for a character), we decided Jack and his son Tony would work. I realize that "Tony" must be some fictional character they already know, but it's generic enough to pass muster.

You can see from the above picture that only one detail was not deemed important to add to the story: "they were wearing a black hat, so the yellow sun doesn't burn them". The kids understood that this detail adds nothing to the story -- revise it out! 

It took several days, but the combined introduction and basic story are a vast improvement to the original stories the kids wrote. They learned about introductions, setting, time order, adjective order, past tense, revising unnecessary details, adding dialogue and even a short, but important conclusion. 

We will continue with process writing like this -- they learned so much, and were so proud of their efforts to draft a 'real' story. 

Rapid Word Reading

Rapid word reading. What is that? Students who are learning to read in English, whether native speakers or not, need multiple opportunities to read familiar words. This game provides a good opportunity for students to practise reading CVC words in a fun and engaging way.

My students loved this game today, and asked to play it again! They were happy enough to decode the CVC words, but really liked the idea of using logic to figure out which stack to lower to gain the space. 

This arrangement shows the 3x3 grid on a table. The stacks include cards with 3 CVC words on each. There are 5 cards in a stack, one for every short vowel. Students have to claim a card by reading the three words on the card on the top of the stack. They quickly realized that it would be a disadvantage to leave two cards on a stack. If they chose the second to last card to read, it would give the other player the opportunity to read the final card and claim the space. Great fun and logic had by all! 

If interested, you can find Ultimate CVC Tic Tac Toe in my store on Teachers Pay Teachers. Enjoy!

Digital Storytelling

Telling stories can be a difficult task for English language learners. With appropriate supports, they can write, produce and narrate their own short 3-part stories.

I've done this activity with newcomers several times, and each time becomes a new opportunity for learning.

Students need to know a few vocabulary items for the house and some basic prepositions. One of the goals of this unit is to have students read and re-read familiar text for fluency. This step happens mostly when the kids are narrating their finished stories.

Here is the process:

Teach your students the names of a few rooms in the house, some items of furniture for each one, and four basic prepositions: in, on, under, behind, in front of, beside. Use flashcards for this step of the activity. For some of your learners, this could take a few games and activities to reinforce the vocabulary. My flashcards came from A Walk in the Chalk's Kristin Vibas.

On a pocket chart, set up sentence frames like this:

Your learners will practise saying the dialogue with a partner and changing the room, object in the room and preposition three times. After the final room and object, the student happily exclaims, "I found it!"

Here is an example of the dialogue:

        A: Where is my bear?

                                           B: It is in the living room.

        A: Where?

                                           B: It is behind the sofa. 

        A: It's not there. Where is my bear?

                                           B: It is in the bedroom.

        A: Where?

                                           B: It is under the bed.

        A: It's not there. Where is my bear?

                                           B: It is in the kitchen.

        A: Where?

                                           B: It is in front of the sink.

        A: I found it!

Once they are familiar with the dialogue format, your students can write their own story, choosing rooms, objects of furniture and prepositions. I tell them they must use three different rooms, three different objects of furniture and three different prepositions. 

After writing their story, they are ready for filming. I have an old dollhouse from when my daughter was little, so I bring that in. Alternatively, you can have groups make their own houses or room sets. I've downloaded house templates in the past, and they work quite well. 

For our projects, we used iMotion. We spend one period getting used to how the app works, and practise moving the characters so it looks like they are walking. I tell students to take a picture for every word the character says, and for every step they take. They need to have their dialogue pages nearby, so they know the order of rooms for filming. Make sure the camera is close enough to the set to fill the shot. Characters will talk and move for each scene. Once the scene is complete, students can move the camera to the next room. By the end of filming, students should have approximately 75-100 shots for their movie. When the filming is completed, the app replays the movie at 15 frames per second. I move the slider to 3 frames per second before saving it to the iPad photo gallery. 

The next step is to include the audio. The student needs to be watching the movie while reading his/her lines. This is done in iMovie. It can take quite a few tries for your student to get the words to match up with the movements.

It's worthwhile to just scroll through the frames of the video with your finger, while matching the words to the action there. Then, once the student is very familiar with the lines, he/she can record them. Patience is an important ingredient! 

For a copy of the dialogue to use with this project, you can find it here: 

STEP Initial Assessment

Fantastic! You have a new student who has come to your classroom from a home where English is not the main language of communication. Your student's home may be in your own city, or they may have travelled halfway around the world to come to you. 


You will be your student's first ally in what is likely a very confusing place to be. 
It all starts with the initial assessment -- conducted either by you, the classroom teacher, or by the ESL teacher assigned to your school. The Initial Assessment is an opportunity for you to get to know your new student through that first face-to-face interaction -- and this sets up positive interactions for the rest of the year!

In Ontario, the Initial Assessment informs educators about the STEP of language acquisition the student is on for learning. STEP stands for Steps to English Proficiency. There are six STEPs: students have achieved a certain STEP if they have demonstrated the behaviours outlined in that STEP consistently over time. Many students arrive who have not achieved the descriptors of STEP 1, and in the absence of other ways to say it, we call them Pre-STEP 1. The initial assessment helps us determine which STEP the student is on. 

The initial assessment itself includes: 

• an oral interview
• a first language assessment of reading and writing
• a picture response
• an early literacy skills assessment
• a reading and writing assessment
• a math assessment based on Ontario curriculum expectations from the previous year

Once the assessment is completed, I share the results with the receiving teacher and plot the student on the STEP continuum.

I've created this Initial Assessment Summary page in Google Sheets in order to streamline this process. This page is available in my store at Teachers Pay Teachers.

Check out this short screencast to learn how to use the IA Summary.

Once you see how easy it is to use, you'll find it difficult to write out the summaries any other way!

Codebreaker

Many people might remember the game Mastermind. The goal of the game was to identify four coloured pegs before running out of possible clues. I've played this game with my students, and used numbers instead of colours.

With this in mind, I decided to create a game where students had to guess a secret CVC word. I first tried this out with a small group of students. On chart paper, I created the grid and challenged students to guess my secret word. This proved challenging, as some of my kids could not remember that my word did not contain certain vowels, so if I said that they had /o/ correct, but in the wrong place, they would not realize that it belonged in the medial position, and then guess a complete different vowel. Ah, me!

I refined the game in the small group by checking individual letters in their appropriate positions. This helped the group to stay away from random guesses. Since I wanted them to play this game in partners, I created a printable version of the game.

My students certainly enjoyed playing this game. I'm sure yours will, too! I've also created other versions of the game if your students are ready for more complex code. Go to my store in Teachers Pay Teachers for this game with CVCe, consonant clusters and blends. 

Learning Skills

Learning skills. What does that mean, exactly? Have you ever tried to explain to your students what they are, and how they are assessed on it? Have you ever tried to connect your classroom rules to them? How about explaining the marks they get?

This is an often overlooked area of lesson delivery. However, it doesn't need to be, nor should it be. The learning skills provide students, educators and parents with the behaviours successful students demonstrate in order to achieve success in Ontario schools. Far too often there is a disconnect between these "soft" skills and achievement.

It's difficult to explain what the learning skills are to regular students in Ontario. If you have English Language Learners, then it becomes even more troublesome.

Essentially, the six learning skills are:

• Responsibility = I know what to do
• Organization = I am ready to learn
• Independent Work = I can work alone
• Initiative = I am ready to help
• Collaboration = I can work with others
• Self-Regulation = I am in control of myself

This is a very simple way of looking at each one.

Students who are responsible are those who know what they are at school to do. They see the big picture and understand their role in it.

Students who are organized are those who have their learning materials at the ready: books, notebooks, pencils, pens, rulers, calculators, their backpacks, agendas... everything. They also know how to organize their time to get work done. If they have a project due in three weeks, they know how to divide the project into doable steps in order to get it done.

Students who are independent are those who can ignore the many distractions that occur in the regular school day. They are also those who can tune out the noise and distractions at home if they have homework or assignments to complete at home. They understand the instructions and can follow them.

Collaboration means more than working on group projects. It includes the day-to-day interactions that occur at school. It means working with a variety of different learners, in a variety of different contexts. It also means accepting the ideas of others, and being able to disagree without showing aggression. It means knowing how to solve conflicts with others in positive ways, so that everyone wins, or at least arrives at some consensus.

Students who show initiative are those who can offer a helping hand when needed. These are the kids who are very good at "surveying the scene" and assessing their role in contributing to a positive outcome. They are willing to try new things, even if it places them in a socially vulnerable position (dance class springs to mind). They see the end goal, and do not allow the opinions of others to interfere with their achievement of that goal.

Finally, self-regulation. This is one of the most difficult learning skills. If you are well self-regulated, it means you know yourself well. You know what you need to do to settle yourself when the situation seems overwhelming. You know how to act when you are feeling sad, angry, frustrated, silly, confused, or sick or tired. Students with good self-regulation recognize when they need to refocus their energy on the task at hand.

Many newcomers do not understand what the learning skills are, nor how they are assessed on them. However, that doesn't mean they shouldn't learn about them. To make them more comprehensible, I've created a set of Learning Skills posters in my store at Teachers Pay Teachers. The language is simplified, and the pictures relate well to the concepts. I keep the posters in my classroom and refer to them when I notice that students are veering away from the behaviours that will serve them better. Have a look!