She and I both chose a word (not telling each other of course) and started to make a playdough sculpture of the word. Then when we had finished we had to look at each other's playdough and using the word only side of the cards select the word we thought went with each other's playdough sculpture. While these rules are not the original rules for the game, it was a lot of fun and achieved the objective of learning sight words and vocabulary.
One game my ESL students love to play is Jenga. We use a variety of different vocabulary cards, sight word cards, onset and rhyme cards etc. The student has to answer a question to get a turn - so it could be a question about a picture (e.g. give me an adjective that describes this picture) or it could be creating a rhyme (e.g. see picture below - tell me a word that ends in op). If the student gets it correct they get a turn, if they get it wrong the next player has a turn. You could easily adapt this to learning times tables, spelling words etc. Two years ago I was given a game called 'RapiDoh' as a secret Santa gift. This game, at the time, was a pretty silly gift. However, it has become a very useful tool in my EAL/D tool kit. The aim of the game is to create a word from the cards with playdough. The cards that came with the box are only really good for higher ability readers so I have added the sight words from the 'WOW I can read sight word flash cards" as these cards have big font and on the reverse side have big colourful pictures of the words. I took these photos today when I played with a new arrivals student who is in Year One. She is using these cards to learn vocabulary.
She and I both chose a word (not telling each other of course) and started to make a playdough sculpture of the word. Then when we had finished we had to look at each other's playdough and using the word only side of the cards select the word we thought went with each other's playdough sculpture. While these rules are not the original rules for the game, it was a lot of fun and achieved the objective of learning sight words and vocabulary. As part of my Bachelor of Education I was able to study a large amount of drama. I firstly did a four semester subject called Children's Theatre and the Creative Arts and I also took Drama in Education. Prior to attending University I had not studied drama at all and so I learned a lot from both of these subjects.
One thing I came to understand as I moved into the role of EAL/D teaching is that drama can be a very powerful tool when it comes to understanding a text and as a motivator for reluctant writers (who often are writing a response to a text they haven't actually understood - hence the reluctance). I thought I would outline a few of my favourite drama activities. There are so many wonderful activities that can be used but here are a few I enjoy. Reader's Theatre: I like to initially create the scripts from the text that the students have written and have them read through it on their own first, then listen to me read it and use their imagination to imagine the characters and then have them read their parts. I always let them use actions, although not all reader's theatre calls for actions and I encourage them to use different voices. As they get used to this activity then I allow them to create their own scripts. A very successful 'student written' script I have seen was from my mixed ESL/LA year 5 writing group two years ago. We had read a very dry and boring text on the Eureka Stockade and I couldn't get the students to fully understand what had happened during the stockade, so I began to have them act little pieces out. Then I had the idea that we should write a script. I broke the group up into three and each part took a different event from the text and wrote parts. We practiced it and then made a few basic props and then we went outside and acted it out - we then filmed it on the Ipad and showed the rest of their classs. The students then went on to write a letter as a miner from the stockade and they each demonstrated a greater understanding of the event than I could have hoped for. Character in Role: This activity is especially useful if you are looking at biographies, narratives and recounts. After reading about a person or a character assign one student to be a character or the person from the narrative. They come out the front and sit in the chair and then they are introduced to the class as though they are that character. They can talk to the class about themselves and then the class gets to ask questions of the character. This is a great way to gauge understanding of the main themes, events or thoughts and feelings related to an event. Living Scultpures: Students are put in pairs and they assume different roles. One person becomse the sculpter and the other person becomes the clay. The students get a character or a scene - or a character and a scene and the sculpter's job is to silently move the person's body to portray the way that character is feeling, an event from the text or the scene. Students who are sculpters then move around the room and check out the sculptures and guess what character or scene they are portraying. Another way to do this is to take photos of the statues and then later on the students write a blurb to go with the photo explaining who the character in the sculpture is and why they are modelled that way. Still life pictures: The students are in small groups for this activity. Students are given a chapter or scene from a novel, or from a part of a biography or from a film. Students have to come up with three still pictures (with no sounds) that portray what happens before, during and after the scene. Once students have worked out their parts and where they will position themselves each group is called up to present their still life picture. The class are asked to close their eyes while the group get in their first still life. They open their eyes and look but do not talk. Then they close their eyes while the group move into their second picture and then open them again to look and do the same for the third picture. Each group's actions are then discussed by the class. Tapping In: This activity is similar to the still life pictures activity. It can be used as an add-on to extend the use of vocabulary. In this activity when the students are frozen in their spots the teacher will randomly tap a child on the shoulder and that child gets to speak as the character. The teacher might ask "What is going on?" or "What are you doing?" or "How are you feeling right now?" and the student will respond as the character, using what is going on in the scene. For example if the still life is of a bully taking a ball from a small child and the teacher taps the small child the teacher might ask "How are you feeling?" and the student playing the small child might say something like "I'm feeling scared. I don't want him to take my ball!" and then the teacher might tap the bully and ask "What's going on?" and the bully will reply. I hope you find these activities useful. I don't want to overwhelm people with too much reading at once so I thought just a few activities to start with. Each of the above activities helps to bring the text to life, giving it a physical appearance which will help with a clearer understanding of events, thoughts or feelings of characters and can also be used as a basis for future writing. I hope you find them useful. : Students Students love Uno. When I worked teaching EFL in South Korea the school that I worked for had an incredible array of Uno cards for all different types of language structures. The concept of the game was identical to the numerical Uno you can buy, however on these sets there were no numbers, there were letters or pictures. We had Uno sets for plurals, comparatives, alphabet, vowel diagraphs, adjectives, verbs etc. It was by far the most popular game our students played and it was often requested. We had double packs so we could include as many students as possible, up to 12. Since returning to Australia I have tried to see I can purchase Uno games like these, however I have been unsuccessful. I have instead started to make my own on Microsoft Word. I have attached a copy of one of the games I made - Superhero Uno - which I use with groups learning to describe adjectives for characters. To modify this set all you need to do is download the Word document, delete the pictures and add your own. The card outlines are there and ready to go. Examples of types of uno cards I have made include the ever popular diagraph uno. On each colour set there is ai, ay, ow, ou, ee, ea, oi and oy. As the students put the card down they have to say a word with that sound in it. If they can't say a word then they skip their turn. As they play it a few times I start to record down the words they say and make the rule that each word can only be said once. Another set I have made is comparatives - I put two pictures on each card (a caterpillar and a butterfly, an elephant and a mouse etc). To put the card down the students have to say a sentence that compares the two pictures, e.g. The butterfly is more beautiful than the caterpillar. The possiblilities are endless - if you do decide to make a set of cards I would be interested to know the different types of sets you make!
When a brand new EAL/D arrives at your classroom door, with little or no English it must send teachers into a state of panic. How can you possibly cater to this student's needs while trying to teach the rest of the class? I am going to try to cover a range of activities that are good for building language skills. I won't cover them all at once as I don't want to bombard you with too much information.
The first activity, one which I use as an ESL teacher, has to do with flash cards. Don't know where to find good flash cards? Try googling 'ESL flashcards'. There are many different sites - most of them are free. One site that I have used before is: eslflashcards.com This website has many flashcards that cover a wide range of basic simple nouns, verbs and adjectives. Print the flash cards twice - so you have two sets. With two sets of flash cards you can play a wide variety of games using different lanugage structures. One on one - the student can play a memory game. With a partner the student can play "Snap" or my personal favourite "Go Fish". I like "Go Fish" because you can adapt it to suit a different language structure and it has a question and answer element. For example, with flash cards for different places I have the students ask: "Are you at the .......?" If the other person has the cards they say "Yes, I am at the ......", but if they don't have the card they say "No, I am not at the ....." You can also use one set of the flash cards with another game like Jenga or Connect 4. To have a turn of the game the person with the flash card asks a question. For example with the verb flash cards the person might say "What are you doing?" and to have a turn of the game the student must look at the card and say "I am ....." You could do the same with sight words, read the sight word to have a turn, or with any flash card. Once you have shown the student and another student how to play the game, you can just send them to play the game with a partner. As they master the set of flash cards, you can replace the set with a different set of vocabulary. It is a great game for non-ESL students to play with ESL students because it is easy and the non-ESL students provide a good language model for the ESL students. It could be a great idea for fast finishers to do. Every Thursday afternoon I work with a very enthusiastic and creative year 2 teacher. She has some amazing ideas for building vocabulary orally, prior to writing. I am learning a lot from her. She only has one EAL/D student in her class, however the strategy she uses to build vocabulary orally prior to writing is showing dramatic improvements for all students.
The aim of our Thursday afternoon lesson is simply to build vocabulary related to a topic, story, science theme etc. Each Thursday we do something different to stimulate the language. One week we did a role play, another week we watched a short video on Youtube, another week we looked at photos from a science lesson the students had participated in, another week we had a variety of books displayed for the children to look at. Once we have completed the first part of the lesson, the students then have to think of one word that stood out (from either the role play, video, pictures, previous lesson, books etc). The teacher writes the one word onto a strip of paper and the students stand up and hold up their words. As each word is held up they say the word out aloud to the rest of the class. Each student must choose a word that hasn't already been said. The end result of this part of the lesson is a group of words related to the stimulus. These words are then used in different ways. They can be used simply to discuss the word as a group, as a basis for a writing task, to create a Wordle, or to create phrases that go with the stimulus. These can then lead to writing a science report, a narrative, a recount etc. An example of how well this works came from only just last week. During the previous week's lesson the class were split into two. I took half the class outside and we performed a Readers Theatre play of a bible story. The rest of the class stayed in the room and watched the same bible story on the SMART board. When we had finished the teacher took her group outside to do the Readers Theatre and I took my group inside to watch the video. This way the students were exposed to the story twice. The students all came back together as a class and the teacher and I went around the room asking students for one word that stood out. Each student had their word written onto a strip of paper, which they then stood up and read aloud to the class. Once the word had been used it couldn't be used again. That is all I saw.... The following Thursday (last Thursday) I came back into the room and the teacher demonstrated with the students what had happened next in the lesson sequence. Using the single words from the initial lesson the students then came up with a phrase from the story. As each person thought of a phrase it was written onto another strip of paper. Each child held up their paper and read it aloud. Then the phrases were sequenced in order and read aloud again. The following day the students then wrote a recount of the bible story. I was amazed at the amount of detail and understanding the students displayed in their writing. Even those students who would usually struggle to think of something had written pages. All of the students had at least two pages of detailed writing. A variety of ability of students (including my EAL/D student) read aloud their finished recounts and they were so proud as they read. You could see they felt a great sense of achivement. I was very impressed. It just goes to show that if you spend the time building the language prior to writing that it will pay off and the level of effort the students put in will improve. I hope to learn more from this inspirational teacher and share it with you all! I love word walls. When I walk into a classroom and I see a display made by both the students and the teachers, I know that it will be meaningful for the students, and that they will refer back to this word wall in their writing. When I was a classroom teacher (over 98%EAL/D students) I created word walls with my students. The students helped to make the objects for the display and then, as a class, we would come up with meaningful labels. I would then hang the objects and the labels up on the wall near the writing area. As the students had been involved in the making of the objects and of the labelling of the objects, they knew what each word said or meant. They would then refer back to these key vocabulary words in their own writing. Below are two different word walls I created. I thought I had more photos of my word walls, but I can't seem to find them. My favourite word wall was a story map of 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt' that the students made. It was three metres long! It had actual mud and grass on it. The students loved creating it. When it was finished we sat down together, as a class, and went through the story and came up with labels that we could put on each part of the map. The labels included not only the place names, what was at the place (e.g. mud) but also the sounds and how the characters were feeling. The next day I did not hang the word wall up on the wall. Instead I laid it across three tables and left some puppets of the characters (just photocopied from the text and cut out and glued onto sticks) sitting at the beginning of the story map. The students, during Literacy time, then used the puppets to go through the story map. The next day I hung it up on the wall and the students were given pieces of paper stapled together to make a book. They were told to write their own story of the bear hunt. They used the word walls for their key vocabulary - and they loved it! Here are some examples of word walls I have made. An infants word wall I created to go with a unit on jungle animals. A Math word wall I create for a Kindergarten class.
While these are just Infants examples (I taught in an Infants school) I have seen some very good word walls used in Primary classes. HSIE and Science topics are great to make word walls with. I have seen two word walls that really stand out. One was in a Year 5 classroom. The students were studying Antarctica and the teacher had created a word wall with pictures, labels, information and student's art. The word wall was added too over the term as they discussed and learned new vocabulary. I wish I had a photo to show you as it was great! Another great one was of the gold fields. A teacher filled their whole back wall with a hand drawn picture of the gold fields and on the wall they labelled the picture with the different mining tools, tents, Police etc. The students could then draw on this large, labelled mural in their narrative writing of the gold fields. One of the students even made the comment that it was like you didn't have to imagine being there, cause the picture took you there......and those students were able to use the vocabulary of the gold field in context. I hope that you get some inspiration from my word walls and from those that I have told you about. They are a really useful tool to explain and remind students of key vocabulary. This is another fantastic idea that I learned at a PETAA course with Margery Hertzberg. It also features in her book 'Teaching English Language Learners in Mainstream Classes'. It is a wonderful book full of very useful ideas for teaching EAL/D students in the mainstream class. What I love about EAL/D teaching is that the skills and the strategies used are useful for all students - not only EAL/D students. They are activities that expand the vocabulary and the understanding of all students and should be used as such. Communicative Crosswords are not your ordinary type of crossword. They require two people to complete the crossword. Each person is given the same crossword puzzle but with only half of the answers (e.g. one person has the down words and the other has the across). The students must not show their sheet to the other person. Taking turns they need to think of a way to describe the answer to their partner without using the word. Their partner can see how many letters the word has on their own sheet. For example: In a communicative crossword about Transport one person might have a list of words such as 'ship, truck, car, plane, taxi'. The other person might have a list of words on their crossword such as 'canoe, bus, train, cruise ship'. The person with 'ship' might go first. They describe a ship to their partner: "It's a type transport that goes on the sea but it is bigger than a sailing boat. It is used to transport heavy goods. You can see them bringing things into the harbour. They are really big." The other person (hopefully) would guess 'ship' using the letter clues from the words already on their sheet and the number of letters. Then that person would describe one of their words and it would go back and forth until the crossword was complete. This activity could be differentiated for students with limited language skills to include the clue to say to their partner. The ultimate goal is that they build the confidence and language needed to explain the clue independently - but until then I find with some students, especially those who lack confidence, it is easier to give them the clues to say and then 'ween' them off. Here is an example of what a communicative crossword might look like: There are many crossword puzzle makers online. I tend to use the Discovery Puzzle Maker Criss Cross Puzzle.
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Mrs McNamaraI am an EAL/D teacher currently teaching in a primary school within the Newcastle area of NSW, Australia. Categories
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