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. 

Elements of Art Vocabulary and Bus Stop in Grade 2

This week in Grade 2, students were learning how to describe and discuss visual art in anticipation of responding to artwork they had picked or created on Ms. Anita's class blog.

Last week, using this scaffold originally developed by Marcelle Houtermann, we had practiced writing a full and descriptive personal response to a few artworks.

We first viewed an interactive version of Van Gogh's Starry Night together. This experience was similar to an interactive read aloud, but more like an interactive view aloud. 


Starry Night (interactive animation) from Petros Vrellis on Vimeo.

In viewing this, we discussed vocabulary related to elements of art such as: line, shape, artform, midground, foreground, background, colour, and movement. I thought aloud while I looked at the image. We zoomed into the spatial elements and examined the colour combinations. We also explored what about the image gave it a semblance of motion. I also took the opportunity to model responding by adding to some of our response/comment sentence starters.

Students then shared a scaffold with a partner,  viewed the class blog together with an iPad, decided on an image to respond to, and drafted a written response together.

In looking back over these scaffolds, Ms. Anita and I decided that we wanted students to use a little more content specific vocabulary. Ms. Anita found this blog post by Cathy Hunt on the elements of art which I shared with students, discussing images we viewed together. 

Then it was the students' turn. Rather than just giving students a list of words related to these elements of line, colour, shape, value, and form, I felt that together they could probably create lists of more value and meaning. I informed students that we were going to create some useful tools to help us write more in depth responses to art and that we were going to do this by doing an activity called bus stop. I informed students that they would rotate around at least 4 of the elements of arts posters that I had created. Every group would have to write words they could come up with related to each of these elements. We talked about how we had to write neatly and of normal size so that we could all share in the list generation and use the knowledge we all had together. 

After four rotations, each group picked up the poster they ended at and shared the words on it with everyone on the carpet. 

Students then referred to these words when responding to the artworks of others, usually with an evaluative statement such as, "...I like how you put shadow and make it dark and you also put a basket of fruit beside it and good background and you make the background a pattern."

Click and Clunk and Word Sorts to Increase Comprehension of Weather Words in Grade 1

This week in Grade 1, students began to do more work with describing weather by exploring and using words related to weather as they inquired deeper into the central idea "Understanding how the weather words helps us to make plans."

Using Click and Clunk to Explore New Words and as a Reflection Tool

In groups facilitated by a teacher, students first engaged in a language acquisition strategy called "Click and Clunk". When engaging in this strategy, students have to make a quick decision whether they know a word or not after it is read to them by a teacher or after they attempt to read it themselves. If students know a word, they put a check or write it in the "click" column. If they do not know what a word means, they put a check or write it in the "clunk" column.

In working through this activity, students were prompted to think about what it meant to "know" a word. Could you use it in a sentence? Could you read it without a teacher? Could you draw a picture of it? Could you introduce it to your friends?

Click and Clunk Weather Words Level 1

Click and Clunk Weather Words Level 2

This click and clunk could then be revisited at the end of the unit in order to reflect on how much students have learned.

At this stage, teachers also began to request students to discuss which weather words they were most interested in. Students thus began to form preferences of weather conditions they wanted to inquire into. In later lessons, teachers will prompt students to form questions about these conditions.

Closed Sorts Help Build Meaning

Next, teachers gave student pairs cut out versions of these words and asked them to sort the words by matching words together. More proficient readers were matched with beginning readers to make sure that most words could be accurately decoded within student pairs. First, students were asked to match words that looked similar. This closed sort helped students notice that certain words had noun and adjective forms such as: rain/rainy; sun/sunny; fog/foggy.

The purpose of this sort was to help students begin to distinguish that different functions of language needed to accurately discuss weather "like an expert". This helped students see that in order to describe the weather, we use the adjective form of weather words, as in "It is a rainy day", but we can describe and maybe even find out about the weather condition of rain.

In order to then add meaning to these words, we asked students to shuffle words and match words that were opposites. Students then created interesting combinations that indicated their current thinking about these words.

These two students showed they naturally grouped clouds and cloudy together, but had misread cold. They learned a lesson about focusing in on the spelling.

These students associated foggy with cold, rain with wet, dry with hot. They also made plain they were not sure what the meaning of humid is. 

As the vocabulary students use for the unit grows in complexity, they will do future sorts for meaning. For example, students may sort weather words into the following groups: tools to measure weather, weather disasters, words to describe weather, etc. 

Future learning climate in Grade 1? 

Cognitive academic language proficiency with a chance of weather research!

Grade 2 Students Use Mother Tongues to Begin Inquiry into Nutrition

As students inquired into nutrition this week, we presented them with many English words related to food and healthy eating in an A3 grid. We then put students into pairs or groups of three based on, as much as possible, the languages we have identified as being their primary languages, or the languages they can best speak and listen in, and asked them to discuss these words in their shared mother tongues.

We also asked them, as much as they were able, to write the words in the alphabets of their own languages, or draw pictures of what they and their partners decided the words meant in the eventuality that they could not actually write in the script of their mother tongue (a very common scenario with international school students whose mother tongues do not use the Roman alphabet for encoding). Students also learned to use iPads equipped with the Google Translate app to assist them in their inquiries and writing of their native scripts.

Some students found this strategy to be very useful, and even identified cognates between their mother tongues and English.

When teaching with strategies such as these that require students to make use of their mother tongues, we want students to learn and understand that:

• Their mother tongues should be the first information sources they check upon encountering new vocabulary in English. Students should ask themselves, "Do I know this word/concept/picture/thing in my mother tongue?"
• It is important when learning new vocabulary in English to begin to understand that same vocabulary in their mother tongues.

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