Focusing on Language for a Grade 2 Unit on Urban Environments Part 1

For the past month or so, grade 2 students have been inquiring into the the central idea that "by developing an awareness of an urban environment we can understand and modify the way we live within it".

Photo by the author

The grade 2 teaching team and EAL department wanted to begin this unit by really tuning into the language students already had mastery of about urban environments. We also wanted to provide students with scaffolds and encourage discussions that might help them extend their thinking and language about urban environments. The teaching team also wanted to involve students in the language planning for the unit as much as possible while making explicit language that students could use throughout the unit.

In thinking about how we, the EAL department, and homeroom teachers could help make students aware of and ready to use the language required for this unit I had previously begun to plan what language I thought would be most important in my language specific blog, The Language Acquisition Depot. I also drew great inspiration from a blog post about numbered heads together and another about webbing and use of key sentence frames written by my colleague and the creator of SPELTAC, Marcelle Houterman. Hey...great teachers beg, borrow, and steal for their students' learning!

Numbered Heads Together

Homeroom teachers and EAL teachers first team taught two lessons using a strategy called "Numbered Heads Together" in order to understand what perceptions students had about the language they would need in this unit and also to increase the amount of talking and interaction during our tuning in. In this strategy, students are put into heterogenous groups of 3 or 4. Each student is given a number from 1 to 4 (we wrote the students' numbers in marker on their hands to encourage them to remember). Students have a discussion about a question in small groups. Then teachers call a number from 1 to 4. Students with this number must share their group's answers with the class. This strategy, we hoped, would encourage all students to listen to each other, pay attention to, and take responsibility for participating in and adding to the group's ideas; these are collaborative goals that students throughout grade 2, but especially EAL students, need help in reaching.

As this was the first time we were asking students to think abstractly about language as a tool that we all use to communicate, teachers felt that it would be useful for the first lesson to simply center around the concept of language as a tool that we use for various purposes. As such, we asked students in groups to discuss and answer the following questions:

• What is language?
• What does language help us do?
• What are pieces/parts of language? 
• What are different kinds of words? 

We discussed the importance of talking and what it meant to be a good talker before the numbered heads together strategy, linking this skill to the learner profile attribute of being a communicator.

Students discussing the language related questions and recording as a group.

We then recorded the whole class shares using an application called Mindmup. Students had a lot of insights about language in general, although they tended to focus on language in terms of foreign languages, rather than as the medium of learning and instruction in general.

In the next lesson, we shifted the group discussions to language that might be necessary to talk about urban environments, a term we directly taught as meaning "cities". We asked students to discuss these new questions: 

• What language do we need to talk about urban environments? 
• What do we need language to help us do when we talk about urban environments? 
• What kinds of words do we need to talk about urban environments? 
• What sentence starters can we make about urban environments? 

Here are results of our discussions. You can see students had a lot of great ideas about both language and the language needed to talk and write about urban environments. Students are beginning to naturally think about language in terms of genres and language purposes/functions.







In part two of this blog post, I will discuss how we moved from discussing language about urban environments in general, to having students share vocabulary they already knew about cities, to writing and sharing sentences that helped extend their thinking about urban environments.