The above website offers up to date news stories at three different levels of English. It would be great for Stage 3 students who are looking at the news and newspapers. Some of the stories have video clips while others are just pictures and text. They are levelled to increase in language difficulty. Great if you can find an article that is on the same topic as a topic your students might have watched on BTN. This is also a great way of exposing students to news in print. I know in the Newcastle area we have the Newcastle Herald Newspaper comp. These articles would be a great way of exposing EAL/D students, and lower ability literacy students, to the types of articles that are written for newspapers.
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Another link that I found while deleting emails was a Chinese/English picture dictionary. I used this when I had two new arrivals from China. It was very useful in the first few weeks. Hopefully you might find it useful too. It was created by Yale University.
While deleting emails from my very full inbox I came across a few links that I obviously thought were worth saving and then never went back to use! One of these links took me to a very comprehensive online picture dictionary that would be very useful for a new arrivals student to learn and build new vocabulary.
Also while browsing the Internet this morning I came across this very useful list. The seasoned ESL or EAL/D teachers out there will already be doing many of these things, but it is great to refresh our memory (especially mine with baby brain at the moment!) and to reaffirm what we are already doing.
Also, many of us are new to the job and some of us will be teaching EAL/D students for the first time next year as either classroom teachers or as EAL/D teachers, and so I thought I would share these tips with you. They are very comprehensive and should prove to be very useful. Keys to Effective Communication I came across this site while browsing the Internet. It has some great tips for classroom teachers of EAL/D students. If you are a classroom teacher you may wish to read these, and if you are an ESL teacher you may wish to share these tips with your classroom teachers.
Seven Teaching Strategies for Classroom Teachers of ELLs This website was shared with me and I thought I would pass it on to you all as it has some fantastic printable graphic organisers - many of which fit in nicely to the Focus on Reading Program. If your school is using this program you may find this site from Teacher Vision useful. If your school isn't using the program, these graphic organisers will be very handy as they are not all English related, in fact they have a wide variety of graphic organisers for different grades and subjects.
I can't say enough about how valuable I feel the super six comprehension strategies from Focus on Reading are for EAL/D students. They allow EAL/D students to explore the text vocabulary and make connections with a text that they may not have ordinarily have made. Today I came across a website for students (or teachers) to create an online Venn diagram.
The activity is featured on a website called Read, Write, Think. Venn diagrams are a great way for students to compare and contrast all manner of things, from characters in a narrative to number and science facts. This online Venn diagram seems simple enough to use and even stage 1 students should be able to follow instructions on how to use it. I hope you find this site a useful tool. I like that the finished Venn diagrams can then be printed out also, so they could then be put into a student's book. It would also be good for making displays and for presenting information on an electronic whiteboard. Don't Let the Pigeon drive the bus is a great story to introduce what being persuasive means to Infants. It is a story by Mo Willem. It is a great example of how someone might try to persuade another person. The pigeon uses a variety of persuasive techniques from pleading, to promising, to giving examples of when he has done similar things, to the use of excitment. It is a great way for students to identify the different methods that the pigeon uses, and perhaps they can identify similar ways they have tried to persuade someone (perhaps a teacher or mum and dad) in the past. While searching Youtube I came across a very clever response to this text by a Grade 1 class in America. It was great to see how their class responded to the text by creating their own persuasive sequal - Don't let the pigeon be the Principal. I hope that the original book is useful to you and can inspire you to do something creative like this too! I can't value enough the importance of general conversation with EAL/D students. Simply chatting about every day topics will encourage student confidence and vocabulary building.
As part of my ESL lessons I try to encourage the students to not only complete their set tasks but also to have a 'chat' either before, after or while doing their work. While it seems like this is 'time wasting' for people who might be walking by our room, the students are getting such valuable experience in talking with an adult in English and also their peers. During these conversations I try not to correct the students. Instead I try to model the correct usage of lanuage, allowing them to hear authentic English conversation, without putting pressure on them to perform in such a way. Over time the students begin to incorporate more authentic and correct uses of English language phrases into their own conversations. I highly suggest - especially with new arrivals and those still developing English conversational skills (BICS) that you try to add some general conversations into your EAL/D groups. While browsing the Internet I came across this website and thought the article looked helpful. I hope these tips help you and your EAL/D students.
Today I walked into a Yr 2 class to collect my 3 EAL/D students. As I walked in the door the classroom teacher very proudly called out "Mrs McNamara....listen to this" and she read to me a persuasive letter that one of my EAL/D students wrote from her pencil sharpener to herself.
I was blown away by how well she had written the letter. The classroom teacher then shared with me the activity that led up to such a great letter. The class had read "The Day the Crayons Quit" by Drew Daywalt, pictures by Oliver Jeffers. They then had to imagine that they were one of the objects sitting in their pencil tin on their desk and they had to be that object and write a persuasive letter to themselves as though they were the object - voicing the objects point of view. This was a great introduction to persuasive writing. I have found a Youtube copy of the story, in case anyone else is interested in doing a similar lesson. The students all really enjoyed the lesson and my other EAL/D students very proudly shared their letters too. All had done a great job! My husband, a Year 4/5 teacher, came up with this fantastic lesson that I just had to share.
He began by asking the children to relax and close their eyes. He then walked them through some relaxation techniques. When they were nice and relaxed (still with eyes closed) he asked them to imagine an ice cream shop. He told them to look at all the amazing and delicious flavours in the ice cream shop. He asked them to imagine what flavour they might choose if they were able to buy any flavour from the ice cream shop. Then he slowly brought them back to the classroom where they opened their eyes. He then introduced the only flavour ice cream in his ice cream shop - vanilla (ice creams were cardboard cut-outs). This was met with disappointed cries, as he had just tempted them with so many delicous flavours! Then he wrote a basic verb (e.g. walk, said) on each vanilla scoop, comparing these words to the flavour of vanilla - "Just like vanilla these words are okay - but there are better, more flavourful words out there that could be used instead". He handed each group a thesaurus and asked each group to come up with a list of words that were more descriptive than the vanilla word that their group was given. The list of words was then checked by the teacher. When the list was checked the students could choose coloured paper to make their scoop of ice cream and write their word on. This resulted in about 8 words per ice cream cone which were then hung up and displayed in the room so that the students could later refer to these words when writing their narrative. (Pictures to come!) When I taught EFL in South Korea I used the website 'Dave's ESL Cafe' a lot. It was a great resource where EFL and ESL teachers shared ideas.
Today, while searching through the ESL Café I came across the ESL Café Idea Cookbook. Here other ESL/EFL teachers have shared their favourite ESL games. There are plenty of ideas for games to use with ESL students. Please take the time to have a read of a few of the games and see if any would be useful. Visit the site here: ESL Café Idea Cookbook |
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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