Focusing on Language for a Grade 2 Unit on Urban Environments Part 2

This is the second part of a two part blog on how EAL teachers and homeroom teachers worked together to help grade 2 students tune into a unit with the central idea: "By developing an awareness of an urban environment, we can understand and modify the way we live within it." In part 1, I wrote about how we began by asking students to think about elements and uses of language and what types of language they might need to discuss urban environments in detail through an interactive language acquisition strategy called Numbered Heads Together.

In this part, I will discuss how language instruction proceeded for all Grade 2 students. In the third part, I will write about how the EAL teachers tried to encourage deeper language development for students who had less proficiency with English.

Asking students to think deeper about their prior knowledge and vocabulary

As teachers, we started students out with discussing general language and the kind of language they might need to talk and think about urban environments. We now wanted students to think deeper about language that they already knew that might be useful for them in their new discussions of urban environments.

For this stage of learning, we still wanted students talking, but we wanted them to begin taking more responsibility for producing and thinking about language for the unit. We likewise still wanted a record of this stage of the inquiry, and we also wanted to subtly begin front visual information that we as teachers felt would be important for the unit.

I started at this point to think about how technology might help us meet some of these aspirations. Google Forms came to mind and I created a survey that we asked students to complete on iPads with a partner. They were instructed to only write words, not sentences, and were taught how to use speech to text on iPads to help with spelling.

How we used student responses

Students were shown how to check other responses on the form, and they had a good time seeing how their responses compared to other students' responses. I then used Google Forms' spreadsheet feature to see all students responses for each question aligned in columns. I then copied these responses for use in the Tagul word cloud application. I created a word cloud for the responses for each of the questions, some examples of which are below.

Student word responses to how can we make urban environments better places to live in.

Student responses as to their favourite places in urban environments.

These word clouds became very helpful visuals for our inquiry, showing some of the basic vocabulary that students began the unit with and also gave us information of the students' levels of understanding about some of the main concepts of the unit.

Later on, as an extension activity, students used these surveyed words to create their own word clouds.  

As further practice, later in the week, students were given copies of some of these word clouds words and sentence starters in a bank. 

Students then used these sentence starters and some of the words they had thought of earlier in the week to write down sentences on large lined sentence sheets that they then shared in a group. To make the activity more indicative of how all of our inquiries connected with the inquiries of others and to encourage everyone to share an idea, we created a spider web of responses with yarn.

When the inquiry is finished, students will complete the Google Form again to see how their responses and the vocabulary they use to discuss urban environments have changed and grown over the course of the unit.