We are now a month (or more) into another school year and that means it is time for the annual struggle to begin. There are many annual struggles in education, but the one I'm considering today is the one that I have been most involved in over the years: the struggle between the ESL teacher and the classroom teacher over accommodations for English language learners (ELLs). A big part of my job as an ESL teacher involves helping ELLs succeed in their content classes. I do this through various means such as finding alternate readings, pre-teaching vocabulary, working with students on projects, helping adjust tests, etc. But the real work ultimately falls on the classroom teacher, and classroom teachers are the busiest and hardest working people in education (except maybe school secretaries--they truly make the education world go round!). I completely understand the tendency towards just translating materials, getting bilingual paras to translate classroom discussions, and generally relying on a students' first language. It's easier on the teacher, it's easier on the student, the teacher is happier, the student is happier...what's the problem? The problem is that while I agree, it is easier and it does (at least in the short-term) make everyone happier, it is not the best thing for the student in the long term. Students need to learn English. Yes, they also need to learn math, science, history, etc., but ultimately their greatest need is to learn English. Consider the big picture. This student has moved to our country and intends to live here for the rest of his/her life. In order to have a future, he/she will need to be able to speak English. Yes, he/she also needs to be able to read and write, do basic math, and understand science, etc., but he/she needs to be able to do all of this in English. When this student finishes high school and wants to go to college, he/she can take remedial math courses if needed, but those courses will be in English. If the student decides to go into a trade, he/she may be able to find an apprenticeship in his/her first language, but what kind of a customer base will he/she be able to establish without being able to speak English? If he/she goes into the military, what language will orders be given in? English. The most crucial educational need ELLs have is to learn English, everything else flows from that. Therefore, we need to do whatever it takes to help these students learn English, while also helping them take in as much of the content as possible. As I've already acknowledged, an ESL teacher's job is to help content area teachers in this effort, but the bulk of the work is going to fall on general education teachers. I've also already acknowledged that general education teachers are extremely hardworking and lacking in one key resource: time. Knowing all of this, when I was asked to put together a professional development on ESL for teachers, I decided to focus on accommodations for the general education classroom. More specifically, I decided to focus on accommodations that I knew worked and did not take much time to implement. In fact, most of the accommodations in this post take less than five minutes (many of them less than 1 minute) to implement. (Attached to this post is a Google Slides version of the presentation I developed for professional development presentations. In it you'll find many helpful examples and illustrations of these accommodations.) 1. Slow Down When learning a language it's not just the tongue that needs to be trained, the ears have to be trained as well. Our ears are attuned to specific sounds and speech patterns, any deviation and we have to work harder to understand what we're hearing. Think about when you speak to someone with a different accent than your own. I don't mean someone who is not a native speaker of English, I mean think about when you have to listen to another native speaker from a different region or country (see slide 2 of the presentation for examples). You can understand them, but it takes more work, doesn't it? You may even find yourself asking that person to slow down a little because the slower the speech the more time you have to process it. 2. Extend Wait Times Another factor that we often fail to consider is how many times an ELL, especially a low proficiency ELL, has to process information. First he has to hear the information in English. Second, he has to search the English for words he knows. Third, he has to "translate" the information into his first language and determine what the question might be. Fourth, he has to search his brain for an answer/response in his first language. Fifth, he has to translate the response into English. Sixth, he has to communicate his response. All of this takes time. Do you know the average teacher wait time? One and a half seconds. Think back to your educational training, what is the minimal wait time for improved learning for all students? Three to five seconds. Try an experiment: start talking to a friend or family member, after finishing a sentence, stop and wait for four seconds (time it with your watch). I'm willing to be it will be longer than you expect and there's a better than decent chance the person you're talking to will start talking. Remember, this four seconds is for your average student, your ELLs need a minimum of ten seconds. Try to wait that long in a conversation and see what happens, I dare you! Make this easier on yourself and give students something to do while they wait. Tell them up front that you don't want anyone to raise a hand until you give a signal, and encourage students to write their responses on white boards or scrap paper to help them think. 3. Enunciate Remember how we talked about our ears needing to be trained as well as our tongues? You can help your ELLs with this process by doing one simple thing: enunciate. Pronounce the complete word, don't slur your words together. This helps your ELLs to more easily hear vowel sounds, word breaks, and other finer points of language. Don't go overboard, you want to model good pronunciation and natural speech, but speak clearly. Think of an actor, they have to enunciate to make their speech clear for large audiences (see slide 3 for an example--President Reagan wasn't speaking slowly, but he was pronouncing every word deliberately and clearly). This same principal of pronouncing each word deliberately and clearly helps ELLs hear syllables, multiple letters, and other idiosyncrasies of the English language. 4. Visualize Almost all teachers put the objective, or at least the topic for the day's lesson on the board. It's good teaching practice. Here's an example: Efni dagsins er veðrið. Ready to learn? No? Why not? The topic is right there, I even used first grade level vocabulary. What if I drew a picture of the sun peaking out from behind the clouds (see slide four)? Can you at least make a guess as to what we'll be talking about? With the addition of one picture (and an easy one that even a non-artist such as me can draw in seconds), you are at least able to figure out the topic of the lesson and start activating your prior knowledge. A simple rule of thumb: if you can add a picture (or clipart), do it. Pictures are key; it's not unusual for ELL to be completely lost with very easy vocabulary or concepts, but as soon as they see a picture her face lights up and she starts exclaiming in her first language a translation or explanation. Put pictures everywhere: on charts, posters, word walls, etc. 5. Subtitles When you show a video, turn on the English subtitles. This not only helps when the speaking gets going to fast for your ELLs, it provides a visual support for the language helping them improve their reading and better segment sounds into individual words. It will also help your native English speaking students catch important information when background noise or music makes words indistinct or hard to hear. If you want to experience the difference this can make, look at slide five in the presentation for an example. 6. Repeat, Repeat, Repeat You know you're going to have to say it all again anyway, don't wait for that one student in the back to wake up and ask you what you just said, say it again now. Research has shown that it takes an average of ten separate meetings of a new word in context for us to truly learn it and its usage. I'm going to say that again--IN CONTEXT. Yes, that means what you think it does, all those hours spent looking up words in dictionaries and copying the definitions truly were worthless. Rather than inflicting that same pointless torture on your students, spend the time explicitly teaching them strategies such as context clues and text features. Then expose them to vocabulary rich texts and environments. Also keep in mind that ten contextual exposures is a minimum for ELLs, and is increased for words that are challenging such as homonyms, idioms, and abstract terms that have changed meaning through the years. See slides six and seven of the presentation for examples of how I make this fun for my students. You can also look at my blog post Vocabulary Activities for examples of how I provide less context-rich exposure to vocabulary in an effort to speed up its acquisition. 7. Kinesthetic Learning We already know that the more senses we involve, the greater the learning. This is magnified for ELLs because the auditory methods and written text (often the foundation of our visual methods after kindergarten) are all but useless for them, especially in the beginning. So what do we do? Active learning! Get them actively doing something; manipulating words, playing with language, and creating things that communicate. This is why math and science are generally an ELL's best subjects, we use a lot of manipulatives and do a lot of lab activities. Slides eight, nine, and ten of the presentation have several examples of this (and activities I like to use) on them. My blog (which you're already reading!) is also filled with games and other activities for playing with words and grammar (and even a few math an science activities). 8. Story Time Read to them, all of them. I read picture books to my middle school students and they loved it. I read picture books to my college students and they love it. All ages like to be read to and all ages can benefit from it. Research tells us that ELLs need to be read to as much as six times more than native speakers! It helps them with their intonation, fluency, and pronunciation, among other things (including context-rich vocabulary exposure). Look into and invest in good picture books for your subject such as Scholastic's Grammar Tales, Magic School Bus books, or the Sir Cumference series. There are lots of picture books out there for all subjects, and don't forget to read some just for the fun of it! 9. Scaffold This one is going to take a little longer, but it's something you have to do anyway. Prior knowledge is absolutely essential. The good news is that many ELLs have grade level knowledge, they just don't have it in English. If you can find a way to access that knowledge, it will help a lot. An ideal lesson should present a new concept or new vocabulary, never both (enlist the ESL teacher to help you pre-teach vocabulary by giving him/her a list and a couple weeks notice). If you must teach new vocabulary and new content simultaneously expect it to take two to three times longer, and know that neither may not actually be conveyed at this time. 10. Love Them You love all your students, but love on your ELLs a little extra. Love translates to any language. I can't count the number of moms who speak absolutely zero English and have quite literally nothing in common with me, but they come to school and give me the biggest, tightest hugs ever. Why? They know I love their children. I can also tell you story after story of students who were terrors for every other teacher but were eager to learn with me; or students who sat in chairs shaking with teachers who were beloved by all, but clung to my hand and refused to leave my side even when I would discipline them and force them to do things they didn't want to do. Why? They knew I loved them. Not that their other teachers didn't, I just had the extra time to spend with them (because I'm not a general classroom teacher and didn't have 30 other little voices calling for my attention) and did. Love them, even when they are hard to love, and you will reap great dividends! But watch out, they just might steal your heart. ;)
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To create the game I started, as I almost always do, in PowerPoint. As I've stated before, in order to prevent things from being accidentally (or accidentally-on-purpose) edited or deleted by students as they play, I put as much as possible into the background. Thus, I start creating my games in PowerPoint and design all of the elements that I don't want students to change or move on the slide. I then save my slides as images (File-Save As-choose .jpg or .png-all slides). In this case, the slide creation was quite simple. I needed a title slide, a game board slide with directions, question slides, and answer slides. My questions were sentences using the academic vocabulary words, the answer slides were definitions for the words. Since I didn't have time to create 150 new example sentences I decided to use the sentences I'd already written for my 30 weeks of academic vocabulary posters. Transferring the sentences was easy. I set up the text box on my first question slide (changed the font, size, and made it bold), opened my original file, copied the sentence, right clicked on my question slide in PowerPoint, and under paste chose the A symbol (text only). This pasted the text into my slide but kept the formatting I'd just set up. I added a rectangle shape that said "Answer," and my first question slide was finished. In order to keep everything the same, I then created a duplicate slide to be my answer slide. I changed the text in the rectangle shape to "Game Board," and changed the question text to be the definition (also copied from the original file) instead of an example sentence. For each subsequent word I created a duplicate of the question or answer slide preceding it and changed only the question or answer text. The one thing I had to be sure to do while creating the question and answer slides was keep my question slides together. In other words, I couldn't have my first question on slide three and the answer for that question on slide four. If slide three was question one, then slide four needed to be question two, and so on. This is for two reasons: 1. the game has to remain in edit mode when students play it and I don't want them to be able to see the answer in the slide sorter on the left, and 2. I knew I'd be using the "draw" a card function in the game play script my husband wrote me and it requires all of the question cards to be sequentially numbered. This meant I had to do some scrolling as I set up the slides, but it wasn't difficult. Once my slides were all designed and saved as images, it was time to insert them into Google Slides. The easiest way to do this is to use Slides Toolbox. The toolbox add-on has an insert tool that allows you to make slides from images and set the image as the background. After opening the toolbox and selecting the images I wanted it took about 2 minutes for everything to be uploaded and set up. Two minutes may seem like a long time, but it is much faster than trying to set over 150 slides' backgrounds individually! The next step was to set up hyperlinks to make my "Answer" and "Game Board" buttons functional. To do this I used the shape tool to draw a box over the "Answer" button on my first question slide. I then changed that box's border and color to transparent. Then I copied the box and pasted onto all of the following question slides. Then, noting the number of the first answer slide, I went back to my first question slide and hyperlinked the "Answer" button to the first answer slide. To do this I clicked on my transparent box, clicked the link button in the toolbar, chose slides in this presentation, and chose the slide number for the first answer. I then repeated these steps for each of the subsequent questions, simply adding one to the slide number I was linking to (question one linked to slide 79, question two linked to slide 80...). Making my "Game Board" button functional was much easier. I simply added a clear box to the top of my "Game Board" button on the first answer slide and linked it to slide three (my game board). I then copied this linked rectangle and pasted it onto each subsequent answer slide. I was now ready to install the game play script. This script adds a menu item to Google Slides that says "Game Play." The sub-menus are "Draw a Card" and "Roll the dice." This game does not require dice, so I had my husband take out that part of the script. Both written and video instructions for installing and using the script are included with the download. You can get your own copy of the script by using the button below. Finally, I needed markers for the game board. I first inserted an X shape (I use the one found under the equation section of the shapes too.). I then copied and pasted it 41 times, so I had 42 X's in total. To get it the size I wanted, I selected all of the shapes, clicked arrange, align, and center. This put all of my X's on top of one another and I was able to easily drag the corners to get them to be the correct size. I then changed the color and distributed them across the bottom of the screen. Finally, I selected half of the X's and changed the color again so each player would have his/her own set. This is the first digital game I've created that does not have a paper-version as well. While there were other activities that changed format or type when they were converted to digital, this one is the first that is completely new. In the future I hope to create a paper-based version, but for now the only option available is digital. You can get either Context Clues Connect Four game by clicking the pictures above, or a discounted bundle of both by using the button below. You can also get the paper-based 15 week academic vocabulary units by using the pictures above, or a bundle of all 30 weeks by using the button below. Also available is a bundle that combines both Connect Four games and all 30 weeks of academic vocabulary.
Sentence Scramble is unique because it has a very specific script to generate the type of sentence students must find. It's also unique because it involves a magic reveal answer slide. I described the step-by-step process of creating magic reveal answers in a previous blog post, and it was the perfect solution to my answer key problem for this game. I knew students would need an answer key, but didn't want to have to set up a hyperlink for every square on the game board. I also didn't want to have a slide that just showed students every answer from the board. The magic reveal trick was perfect because students can drag the magnifying glass to reveal only the answer they need while the others remain hidden.
The final activity pictured above, Clip 'Em Centers, is a set of self-grading task cards, not a board game. I gave the step-by-step directions for creating these cards in a previous blog post, but I'm rather enamored with them. Students type their answers into specific cells of a Google Sheet or Excel spreadsheet, those answers are automatically recorded and graded on a separate tab, and a final tab gives students their total results. While the activity doesn't involve any scripts, it does solve my problem of not knowing what my students answered when they completed digital task card activities. In short, the past couple days has been a kind of culmination of all my learning over the last few months. I'm excited that I'll be able to use so many of my favorite paper games and activities this semester during distance learning. I hope you find them helpful as well!
No doubt one of the most popular books to read on Talk Like A Pirate Day is How I Became A Pirate by Melinda Long. Activities two and three both relate to this book. The second activity I have for our celebration is a set of sequencing sentences. In both the paper version and the digital version, students read the sentences and put them in order to retell the story. The paper version needs to be cut ahead of time (I recommend printing on card stock and laminating before cutting so you can reuse the same sets each year.), but the digital version is a drag and drop activity that is ready to go.
Our third activity, which also relates to How I Became A Pirate by Melinda Long, is a noun-verb sort activity. While all of the words in this activity are taken from the book, it is not necessary to use this activity in conjunction with the book, it can be a stand-alone activity. In the paper version, students sort the word cards into the correct columns on the sorting mat: people nouns, place nouns, thing nouns, and verbs. In the digital version, students drag and drop the words into the correct columns. The final activity I like to use to celebrate National Talk Like A Pirate Day is not directly related to pirates, but is a play on the pirate word, "Arg!" Since the word "arg" sounds so much like "are," I decided to make a pirate-themed homophone activity to practice distinguishing between are, our, and hour. The paper version of the activity is what I like to refer to as a triple play, because it can be used three different ways: as response cards, a task card/scoot activity, or a slap game. To use the response card version, the teacher reads the sentence and students hold up a card with the appropriate word to go in the sentence. Task card scoot can be played by hanging cards up around the room and having students move from card to card, writing down their answers, or by having students pass cards from person to person as they write their answers. Slap is probably my students' favorite way to play these games. I use strong magnets to attach the large response signs to the board and divide the class into two teams. One student from each team comes forward, takes a fly swatter, and listens as I read the sentence aloud. The first person to slap the correct answer with his or her fly swatter earns a point for his or her team. It's a lot of fun and students love the competition aspect of the game. The digital version is an independent digital task cards activity. Students read the sentence on the card and click the ship representing the correct word to complete the sentence. Students are then taken to a slide that tells them if their answer was correct or incorrect, and shows them the correct answer. The best thing about these task cards is unless students click on the boats to answer the question, or the map to go to the next question, the slides will not advance. Take a look and see for yourself: Nice, huh? No more having students just randomly click through slides without at least paying attention to where they are clicking. As with the vocabulary game, the digital version of this game is available in both Google Slides and Microsoft PowerPoint, so it doesn't matter where your school's affiliations lie. Thinking that all of these activities sound great? Want to try them all? No problem, they are available as bundles, as well as individually. The bundles allow you to get all of the activities together at a discount. Three different bundles are available: all four paper activities, all four digital activities, all eight paper and digital activities. Happy National Talk Like A Pirate Day, everyone!
fits lately. My own things were easy, I have all the original files and was able to edit and convert as needed. Not so much with those that came from other sources. For some of the activities I ended up creating something brand new (like my Context Clue Connect Four Digital Game, blog post coming soon), but I don't have time to create something to replace all of my existing games and activities (and I really like some of them). Today I figured out how to use all of those great PDF games I have!
My first thought was to copy and paste the part of the PDF document that I wanted. Nope, didn't work, couldn't select anything. Second, I tried opening the PDF in Adobe Photoshop Elements, but that didn't work either. Finally, I remembered seeing a video about how to create editable text from a non-editable PDF. In the video the presenter talked about using the Snipping Tool to take a screenshot of part of the PDF. I decided to try it, and it worked! I just searched for Snipping Tool on my computer and it came right up. I clicked on New, drew a box around the part of the PDF I wanted, and saved the image to my computer. Now that I had the game board the rest was easy. I opened a new PowerPoint file, resized the slide to be 17x11 (click on Design, Slide Size, Custom), and started designing. First, I built my title slide. Having a title slide isn't necessary, but I like to put one there so I can quickly know what game I'm looking at in my Google Drive. Second, I added a second blank slide and inserted the image of the game board I snipped earlier (Insert, Pictures, This Device). Third, I inserted a text box and typed out step-by-step directions for students to follow when they played the game. Finally, I put in the Teach This logo (I am very strict with my students about plagiarism and wanted to be sure to give proper credit to the creator of the game board.) and my own Gaming Grammarian logo. Why did I do all of this work in PowerPoint when the game is going to be played as a Google Slide? Simple, protection from accidental or accidentally-on-purpose edits by students. I design all unmovable parts of my digital activities in PowerPoint or Publisher and save them as images. To save these slides as images I clicked File, Save As, my destination folder, and chose .jpeg as my file type. PowerPoint will then ask if you want just the one slide, or all of them. If you choose all slides PowerPoint will create a new folder and place all of your slide images inside it. It was now time to put everything into Google Slides. I opened a new Slides presentation in my Google Drive and named it. Since I only have two slides in this game I didn't bother with the Slides Toolbox add-on, but I highly recommend it for when you have a large number of slides to upload as backgrounds. With only two slides it was just as easy to right click on the white background, choose Change Background, Choose Image, and navigate to where PowerPoint had stored my backgrounds. After adding my title slide I added a blank slide (click the + button) and repeated the process to add the game board. Now there were only three things left to do:
There are a lot of options out there for dice, but most of them involve going off to another site, and many of my students struggle with moving between tabs on the computer. To avoid these problems, as well as the distractions that inevitably arise from students moving around the web, I use a special script that my husband wrote for me. The Dice Script adds a menu item to Google Slides that says "Dice." The script doesn't actually add pictures of dice, and nothing moves on the screen, but it does produce a random number between one and six. My students don't mind not having actual dice at all and find using the menu to be quite easy. If you are interested in how I add the script I've made a video showing the step-by-step process: Once I hit the reload button (to activate the script, you only have to do this after installing the script the first time), I was ready to play. To allow my students to play the game I make a copy for each group of four students (so they won't all be playing on the same file and because I never let my students have access to my original files). Each copy is then shared, with editing rights, with the four students who will play it, and we are ready to go. The students open the file using the share link and are automatically in the same file. Remember, the file must remain in editing mode during the game! If the file is put in present mode the game pieces will become unmovable and students will lose access to the dice menu. Students can talk to one another via our virtual meeting platform (we're using Blackboard Collaborate) or through the built in chat feature found in all Google Apps. In class I wander from group to group, listening in and helping as needed. Digitally I jump in and out of breakout rooms. If I wanted to be able to check all the sentences my students use I could use the comment feature. Tell students that on each turn they need to right click on the square where their piece is, click Comment, and type out their sentence before clicking Comment again. That will create a record of all sentences that can be viewed later. I have to say, this is a game-changer for me! The list of resources that needed to be either converted to digital or replaced with something new was starting to depress me. Now I feel re-energized and excited about the rest of the semester. Want this game for yourself? Click on the picture above or the button below. The link is a force a copy link, you'll be prompted to add a copy to your Google Drive. Please note, the dice script needs a little longer to load, it may be as long as 30 seconds before it appears. The exact length of loading time depends on your connection. |
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