Week 2 in Review - Introducing, Practicing, and Extending Basic School Language and Interactions in EAL Grade 2 (During Foreign Language Times)

It has been another exciting week in EAL during Foreign Language times slots this week as we have wrapped up our introduction lessons intended to help build our community of learners, make newcomers feel welcome, and make sure that all students have some utility with discussing classroom and school items, school places, and behaviours we need to exhibit in class to learn well together.

After a quick teacher scribed and led discussion about what it means to respect each other on Monday, students began to try to answer these questions:

What things do we need in the classroom and school to help us learn? Where can we find them? 
What places are in our school? What things do we do at these places to help us learn? 

Students first wrote down the names of different classroom items on scrap paper, engaging in a learning strategy known as "Mix and Match". As teachers, we noticed that students seemed to only write down, discuss, and be familiar with a limited amount of classroom items. We therefore devised a second activity where in three groups, students played "Headbands" in which they helped describe a school item to a student wearing a photograph of the item on his or her head.

"Family playing the headbands game" Photo by Lars Plougmann https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Next this week, students pooled their knowledge while working with their "12 o'clock buddies" in order to describe places around our school during a learning activity entitled "Roving Charts". With their buddies, students rotated around pictures of various places at our school. At each picture, they had to try to answer the following questions with words, phrases, or sentences:

Where is this place?
What do you see in this place?
What words describe this place?
What can we learn to do at this place?

Here is the information they came up with:

Students then practiced listening to the names of various places by playing a game called "Go to the..." in which individual and groups of students were "sent" to various "places around the school" in the form of signs hung up at different places in the classroom. Then in three groups, students practiced "sending" each other to these different places, sometimes by naming the place, other times by describing the place.

As part of a future game when we have ten minutes, we may reinforce basic descriptions and names of places around the school by playing "I have...who has...?" involving these places.

All of these early language activities involving discussing and describing various people, items, and places in the children's learning environment allowed them to practice using English for the purpose of informing.

Next week, we begin to dive into language related to the students' current unit of inquiry.

Building a Community of Learners in Grade 2 EAL Classes

A student shares his group's ideas for our Essential Agreements

Some of our Grade 2 students attend English as an Additional Language classes during the times that other students attend Foreign Language classes. In these classes, students will engage in language experiences that deepen their understandings of concepts related to their units of inquiry and literacy lessons. These classes are taught by myself and two of our very capable EAL teaching assistants, Ms. Mom Meach and Ms. Boramey Bun.

However, as in all types of classes, students spend a few lessons getting to know each other and collaborating on a variety of projects in order to build what we refer to as a community of learners. As part of this first week's classes students created informative "ID Cards" that they wear in class to help other students remember their names and find commonalities. As part of a lesson we introduced with the question, "How do we get to know each other?" students completed key sentence frames that they could refer to as they circulated around the class introducing themselves and listening to information about their peers. 

Students also worked in groups to think about, discuss, and scribe rules that they thought we should live by in order to make sure our classroom is a good place to learn. Altogether, students came up with the following Essential Agreements:

Clean up after ourselves!
Give friends a chance to speak.
Take care of books.
Listen to the teacher and others.
Help each other.We respect each other.
If we want to talk, we should raise our hands.
We are allowed to run outside with permission [but should walk in the class].
We should do good work.

A student demonstrates how to make eye contact while reading... 

Moments from class!