This week in Grade 1, the EAL teachers team taught with Ms. Rachelle in order to help students begin to build meaning related to the vocabulary of the current unit of inquiry with the central idea of "Being aware of how we interact with people can help us make good choices for ourselves and others."
Now at the beginning of each unit, homeroom teachers and EAL teachers try to come up with a list of vocabulary, language purposes, and possible strategies we can use to help students develop understanding of the meaning of this vocabulary. We also use an app called Bitsboard on iPads to develop activities involving visual, audio, and textual information that for the most part students can use to explore this vocabulary during independent station activities.
In addition, during this unit, some teachers have elected to ask students to prethink what they believe the 10 most important words of the unit will be. The 10 most important words strategy is a valuable tool which can be used at various points of the inquiry process. It can be used, as in this unit, as a tool to show how students are accumulating growing understandings of important vocabulary, especially if students' statements about which vocabulary is important keep being revisited.
As part of using this strategy, the EAL teacher and homeroom teacher led a discussion about the word "Interactions" to show students how we wanted them to think of the different words they had been hearing and seeing in the past three weeks. Students were then asked to think of more words that they could remember or think of that they thought we might encounter as we inquire further.
Students then worked with partners to fill up their lists, while practicing English for the purpose of agreeing and disagreeing. In the next lesson, the homeroom teacher and the EAL teacher then discussed key sentence frames necessary for the purpose of EXPLAINING. After asking students to explain WHY they had written certain words, we highlighted how their responses almost universally began with "Because...". We wrote sentence frames on the board:
We think this word is important BECAUSE...
This word is important BECAUSE...
Students then reunited with their partners and wrote an explanation of their thinking behind some of their assertions.
This learning engagement really helped us understand how students are taking on the language of the unit. It showed us that their lexical knowledge is currently quite basic, limited to common terms used in the classroom such as: sharing, playing, swimming, respect, etc. We know as a team that we must create further materials to help students take on more complex words like: cooperation, complimenting, conflict, conflict resolution, etc.
In completing this lesson, I also decided to do a bit of research on this strategy and other ways in which it is used.
I found out that the 10 most important words strategy can also be a useful tool for checking the comprehension of more proficient students as they read through texts related to inquiry topics, as can be seen in the presentation below.
Now at the beginning of each unit, homeroom teachers and EAL teachers try to come up with a list of vocabulary, language purposes, and possible strategies we can use to help students develop understanding of the meaning of this vocabulary. We also use an app called Bitsboard on iPads to develop activities involving visual, audio, and textual information that for the most part students can use to explore this vocabulary during independent station activities.
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| Graphic Organiser by Chad Manis www.DailyTeachingTools.com |
In addition, during this unit, some teachers have elected to ask students to prethink what they believe the 10 most important words of the unit will be. The 10 most important words strategy is a valuable tool which can be used at various points of the inquiry process. It can be used, as in this unit, as a tool to show how students are accumulating growing understandings of important vocabulary, especially if students' statements about which vocabulary is important keep being revisited.
As part of using this strategy, the EAL teacher and homeroom teacher led a discussion about the word "Interactions" to show students how we wanted them to think of the different words they had been hearing and seeing in the past three weeks. Students were then asked to think of more words that they could remember or think of that they thought we might encounter as we inquire further.
We think this word is important BECAUSE...
This word is important BECAUSE...
Students then reunited with their partners and wrote an explanation of their thinking behind some of their assertions.
This learning engagement really helped us understand how students are taking on the language of the unit. It showed us that their lexical knowledge is currently quite basic, limited to common terms used in the classroom such as: sharing, playing, swimming, respect, etc. We know as a team that we must create further materials to help students take on more complex words like: cooperation, complimenting, conflict, conflict resolution, etc.
In completing this lesson, I also decided to do a bit of research on this strategy and other ways in which it is used.
I found out that the 10 most important words strategy can also be a useful tool for checking the comprehension of more proficient students as they read through texts related to inquiry topics, as can be seen in the presentation below.
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