Adventures in Literacy Land: Writing

Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts

Working Walls with Guest Blogger Pixie Anne

Welcome to another guest blogger ~ Pixie Anne with some ideas to help you with

Hello!

I'm Pixie Anne from Growing Little Learners and I am delighted to be blogging here at the amazing Adventures in Literacy Land today to share how we use a Working Wall in Literacy in my classroom.

Working Walls are such a great way to have an up to date, relevant, child led display that supports learning in the classroom and helps the children to see the bigger picture and learning journey they are on!

An added bonus is that they are so easy to throw together throughout the week as you are doing the work in class anyway - no extra cutting and laminating at home, no hunting for the perfect image or trying to be super creative with ideas! I love mine!

So today I've decided to share how my most recent one came together and there's a freebie for you at the end so keep on reading...

The Working Wall always starts with an example of what we are aiming for by the end of the week (What A Good One Looks Like).

We began our week of instruction writing (inspired by George's Marvelous Medicine) by Gathering Content. We investigated bossy verbs and adverbs by playing some simple games (Simon Says and Adverb Charades) and then looked at a whole bunch of different instruction texts to hunt for examples of each to add to the working wall.

To understand and explore the features of the genre and create a Success Checklist I brought in lots of recipe books from home. They were out on tables with post it notes when the children arrived in the morning and I challenged them to work in pairs to find and label some of the features they could see.

We had a class discussion about the features they spotted and I jotted them down on strips of paper to refer to in the next activity. I gave out copies of recipes for them to annotate with the features. This was a perfect chance for me to gather a bit of reading evidence too - understanding the features of a non fiction text!

The wall so far...

Next came the Planning. We had a lot of fun coming up with disgusting ingredients together in some shared writing (my poor Learning Support Assistant was looking a bit green by the end of the session!),

This girl had lots of good ideas!

We also planned ideas for the method using time connectives and all the bossy verbs and adverbs we had previously generated.

Here's how the wall was looking at this point. I desperately need a bigger wall but have no space in my classroom so I have to squash it all in as best I can!

Then comes the Drafting! We recapped what we had learned so far (using the wall!), I modeled my own recipe and then asked them to work on their own.

My support group still really struggled to set the instructions out correctly even with a writing frame and had the method written in the 'you will need' section but the content and what they were trying to write was good! Here is one from one of my stronger writers and this was added to the wall as a best example.

We ran out of time and I couldn't squeeze on the Editing and Improving heading. We will bring to a published form for a class recipe book next week but for now the working wall is complete and shows the learning journey we went on when writing our instruction texts!

I really do love these displays and strongly feel they support the learning in the classroom.

I feel a little embarrassed by the tatty headings I have on the board, so I have created some new ones to use which I want to share with you! Click here or on the picture below to grab your freebie! There are different choices of headings depending on how you phrase things in your classroom.

I hope you've found some inspiration or ideas here that you can use! I'd love to hear how you use working walls in your classroom or any tips you have on how I can improve mine so please leave a comment or contact me over on my blog (Growing Little Learners)!

Thanks again to Adventures in Literacy Land for having me join you for today - it's been great!

Take Care

Teaching English Language Learners: SEI

Hi everyone! It is Bex here from Reading and Writing Redhead! This summer, I have been engrossed in studying Sheltered English Immersion. In Massachusetts all non-English speaking students need to be enrolled in mainstream English-speaking classrooms (with a few exceptions). ESL instruction might be done in a pull-out setting but the majority of an ELL student's day is spent in the classroom. The state realized that we teachers needed to learn more about effective strategies to meet the needs of those English Language Learners, so all of us have to either take a course or pass an SEI exam. Since I have been thinking so much about SEI lately, I realized many of you have English speaking students in your classroom and it might be the right topic for a post!

So if you are new to this, you may need to start at the beginning - what is SEI? In Massachusetts, SEI is Sheltered English Instruction. I know in other states, it stands for Structured English Immersion and has slightly different characteristics, but I will tell you what I know. By no means am I an expert- if you want to know more I will give you some resources at the end but if you want to learn more about teaching ELL students in your own state check resources at your school and your state Department of Education Website. Let us know what you learn and comment below.

The short answer is that every classroom in Massachusetts that has at least one ELL student is a SEI classroom. Each SEI classroom must have a Highly Qualified Teacher of English Language Learners- that means the teacher must be certified in ELL, taken and passed the required state SEI course or taken and passed the state teaching exam for SEI. Basically, classroom teachers and school staff who interact with ELL students in any way are learning what are the best practices for teaching these students in the English speaking classroom.

I'd love to share with you some of the strategies I learned about being a teacher in an SEI classroom. There was a lot of information I had to learn about levels of English Proficiency and how to assess what level students were and a LOT of information on setting both content and language lessons for every lessons, plus differentiating lessons for students at different levels of proficiency- too much for one blog post. Here are a few tips I picked up on.

I had done some reading and taken a course in teaching ELL students last spring, and combined with the materials I studied the summer, I picked up on some vocabulary strategies to try when working with ELL students. There are a ton of effective strategies and each works best in different situations depending on the word, the content area, the age of the student, and their level of English proficiency.

Word Wheels are great to try. You write the word you are learning in the center and then it is flexible - you can write synonyms, antonyms, word forms, or semantic connections around the outside. Here are a couple examples with detailed directions on Word Wheels: Primary Education Oasis' Blog Post and Widgit.com's preteaching vocabulary brochure pdf.

A word form chart was another suggested strategy for teaching vocabulary to ELL students. I couldn't find a good example of it online but, basically you chart a vocabulary word that has different forms (great for verbs - you can do past tense, present tense, etc) and discuss how the meaning changes and how to use each form. A goal of vocabulary instruction is giving students the tools to unlock word meaning on their own and this is a good way to start!

Focusing on cognates is a solid strategy to use with ELL students. Cognates are words in different languages that are derived from the same original word or root (for example family - familia and conversation and conversacion). There are tons of words in Spanish, for example, that are cognates with words in English.

There are many more great strategies. I will provide links below so you can check more out!

There are many writing strategies that will support your ELL student. One that would be useful for students with lower English proficiency is sentence frames. Sentence frames are sentences the teacher writes, then removes one or more word from . A word bank can be provided for students with content specific words, for example. So a student who has limited writing skills in English can complete sentences such as: Plants need, ________, air, and light to grow. The _______ of the plant take in water from the soil. The ______ of the plant carries the water to the leaves" and so on instead of having to write an open response stating what they know about plants.

Here are a couple places where you can find more information on sentence frames:

Fairfax County Schools' First Grade Team Post on Sentence Frames

Positive Engagement Project's Sentence Frames Information

For students who are early in their English language development and need a lot of assistance with literacy skills you can try the language experience approach. A student would verbally tell you their story and you write it down, word for word as he tells you. Then you read it back and discuss how the story sounds, if the message was communicated, and so on. Then you and he can edit it a little together. I am not an expert on this one, as I have never tried it myself but you can learn more here:

Professional Learning Board

Literacy Connections

One more strategy that came up a lot as I was reading about teaching ELLs in the SEI classroom was graphic organizers. Graphic organizers have endless possibilities in the classroom anyway, and are so beneficial to ELL students to organize their thoughts and get their ideas written down. There are so many graphic organizers for skills like sequencing, cause and effect, etc. that can be use in writing assignments. Check out these ideas in detail:

Color in Colorado Project

ESL Partyland

BusyTeacher.org

I have even more ideas for strategies on teaching reading to ELL students and assessment but I am going to save them for a future post! For now here are some great resources from around the web if you are interested in learning more. Thanks and please comment below and let us know your thoughts and strategies for meeting the needs of ELL students in your classroom!

Mrs. Dailey's blog post on vocabulary
Color in Colorado
Adventures in TESOL
Sharing Learning- Teaching English with Technology
Ed.gov Blog
Everything ESL

And a thank you to Ashley Hughes for the beautiful frames and Dollar Photo Club!

Celebrating Young Authors

We would like to welcome a guest blogger to our Literacy Land today: Maria from Curious Firsties. She is a first grade writing teacher. That's right! She teaches four 70 minute blocks of WRITING each day! Needless to say, she has a passion for our young writers!

Thanks for joining us today, Maria!

Writing is a beautiful thing. Can we get an amen to that?! We are so blessed to be able to watch this process unfold in our young firstie writers. After weeks, I mean WEEEEEKS, of sketching, writing, conferencing, sharing, conferencing some more and then finally choosing a piece to take to publication, our firsties are in need of some type of reward for their efforts.

So we reward them with a PARTY! And, who doesn't love a party? Our firsties LOVE being able to share their work with families, friends, other students, teachers, and even our principal! We love the look in their eyes when they are reading a piece THEY wrote and illustrated. We love how empowered they feel as authors.

Here's the fun part of celebrating authors..... THE CELEBRATIONS! We have celebrations for just about every author we study in our writing class. We like to mimic authors such as the GREAT......... MO.WILLEMS. (in my best Jimmy Fallon voice)

We love keeping our decorations simple and cheap. :)

Next up.... Jane O'Connor
After reading all about Fancy Nancy, we have a celebration to read our "How-To be Fancy/Handsome" to our parents. Our firsties get all dressed up in ruffles, pearls, and suits. For those who "forget" because sometimes that happens, we have our own Ooh La La Beauty Spa! Here we give out mustaches, paint fingernails, tie bows in the girls hair and give the boys bowties! It has been a BIG hit the last two years!

Our next big celebration is for all our nature enthusiasts! This year we added a SAFARI WALK to our research celebration. We think this was a student favorite. Of course inspired by Pinterest we set up our classroom like this...

And for this coming school year we have a few more celebrations in the works, but parties will not be on the top of that list. Instead, we will focus on one goal. We will be celebrating author accomplishments daily! We are great about using our words to tell them how they are doing, but we'd like to take this a step further! Our newest way to celebrate authors is by giving them bracelets!
Not only will our firsties love them, but our parents will also be informed about what their child is doing well at in writing class. :) Two birds. One stone. :)

The inspiration for this came from my own girls. They LOVE, LOVE, LOVE bracelets. My oldest loves them so much she never takes them off. She told me, "Mom, it's a part of me." That's when I thought..... hmmmm.... How can we do this in our classroom? Bracelets.For.EVERYONE!