My next step was to go through my curriculum and make a word wall card for every vocabulary word in every story. Each card had the word, a student-friendly definition, and a picture. You can download the pdf version of these cards for yourself using the buttons below. I will warn you though, I never actually taught all eight units of either book, so I never actually finished the final unit of level A, nor the last two of level B. I also realized too late that I would eventually need to sort these cards out again and it might be good to label the back of them with the level and unit number. Hopefully you can learn from my mistake and save yourself some time and work. Then came the fun part: the teaching. Before we'd read a selection in our books, my students and I would all gather around the word wall. We'd discuss the vocabulary for that selection one-by-one, talking about the word and its definition, discussing the part of speech, finding it in the text and reading the sentence, and then creating example sentences of our own. We'd then staple the word into the correct section of our word wall and move to the next. By the end of the year we had quite the collection of words, but now they were all words we had carefully considered and used, we'd actually learned the vocabulary. Besides the vocabulary from our readings, we also worked with academic vocabulary from two different sources. The first was the previously mentioned CCSS academic vocabulary units I did with all of my classes, and the ELA teachers at the schools used as well. The second was the academic vocabulary addressed by the Inside series. The text books themselves had virtually nothing addressing academic vocabulary, and what was in the workbook was weak and (in my opinion) boring. I ultimately made a list of the words practiced in each unit and created my own academic vocabulary instructional plan and activities. Besides the word wall cards, for each unit we also had a cart we completed (word, picture, definition, example sentence), sort cards, clip cards (center held the definition, the words were around the edges), match-it cards, worksheets, scrambled word sets, and an assessment. The entire package is available for both Inside level A and level B (click the pictures above), but can also be used with any curriculum as they don't depend on the Inside texts at all. It took time for the students to adjust, but the word wall became a valuable resource with students often perusing it to remember old words and discover new. Since we spent significant time discussing the words before adding them to the wall, the students felt a sense of ownership over it. When I tried to take some of the older words (from first semester) down to make room for new ones, they protested quite vehemently saying, "Don't mess up our wall!" I was ultimately forced to expand the word wall to a second (and sometimes third) bulletin board, but I didn't mind, my students were learning and using new vocabulary!
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coloring picture, vocabulary, a short reading (less than ten sentences with an illustration for each sentence), and comprehension activities. They are the perfect level for beginning students, and every holiday you can imagine is represented, with the "bigger" holidays having more than one reading and comprehension. It was my low intermediate students that I was struggling with what to do. They already knew the basics of the holiday, most had been in the USA for at least one year, but I still didn't want to get into the scarier aspects, or the history of it. I finally decided that I wanted to approach it using literature.
One of my favorite series to use with intermediate language learners is the Cam Jansen series by David A. Adler. The books are mysteries, but they are not scary, and have a touch of humor to them. The main characters are relatable and the books provide excellent opportunities to practice skills such as predicting, inferencing, and others. They are also relatively cheap (usually less than $5 a copy), so I could afford to get a copy for each student (I did a Donor's Choose project to get the funds). Thus, Cam Jansen and the Mystery at the Haunted House became my book of choice for Halloween. I sourced much of our comprehension work from edHelper, and their free literature unit for the book. To go along with it, my students and I created The Word Cemetery bulletin board, which I described in my last blog post. The first time I taught the book I realized I'd forgotten something: vocabulary. How I forgot vocabulary is still a mystery to me. I spend huge parts of my life teaching vocabulary and have an entire set of vocabulary activities I use regularly. Since I never want to make the same mistake twice, I developed a vocabulary sort activity to use in the future. Now, before reading the book, we go over the vocabulary and use the sort cards (available by clicking on the pictures above) to practice. The last couple of years I've been teaching adults at a community college and I've actually missed getting to read this book. If our curriculum weren't so packed, I'd still try to work it in, but for now I just remember previous years fondly. Hopefully you and your students can enjoy the book for me. Happy teaching!
Each student received a different graphic organizer (a total of eight words were represented). After completing the graphic organizer they were able to use it as payment for a tombstone and ghosts. In groups (based on the word from their organizer) the students designed the tombstone listing the overused word as the name and the part of speech as the relationship. They then listed one synonym on each ghost (a minimum of three was required) and decorated those as well. Everything was eventually combined into one bulletin board under the title of "Word Cemetery Where Dead Words Rise As Synonyms." The students loved it and actually started using some of the synonyms on occasion! Administration thought it was great too and specifically commented on how clever it was after a walk through. This year our October celebrations are online so I wanted to develop a digital version of the activity. I decided to use one of my favorite programs: Google Slides. The basic concept is still the same and slide four (pictured above) has the eight tombstones, along with an example and a supply of ghosts already provided. The example and tombstones themselves are in the background, and thus protected for accidental (or not-so-accidental) editing. The graphic organizers appear on the following slides, one for each word, and are also in the background, with textboxes supplied for student notes. One of the things that most excited me about this project was it gave me a chance to create my first "infinity" draw piles. I'd seen other digital activity descriptions refer to them, but hadn't really thought about their creation. It turned out to be remarkably simple, one of those "Duh!" moments that I seem to be having so often these days. I simply chose my ghost (once again I was able to find the royalty free clipart I needed on Pixaby), added a text box, grouped the two together, and copied/pasted it about 20 times. I then selected all of the ghosts (easier for the first set since I could simply click ctrl+A), right clicked on them, chose align vertically-middle, align horizontally-center, and they had all moved into a single pile. I repeated the process with the second ghost (because I just had to have two different ghosts), and I had two "infinity" piles of ghosts students could drag and drop. Of course the piles aren't truly never ending, but since students were only required to do three synonyms per dead word (meaning a total of 24 synonyms), and there are about 40 ghosts in total, the chances of them running out are slim. If your students are over achievers, and you fear them running out, simply paste a few more ghosts onto the slide before aligning them into a single pile. You can get both of these activities for yourself by clicking on the pictures above. As I said, my students found the process to be a lot of fun and it was a great addition to our October festivities. Happy teaching everyone! Want more synonym fun? Check out my French Fry Synonyms Sorts!
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!
At the most basic level, English Skillology is a choice menu. It includes four activities for each of the five skill areas in ESL: reading, writing, speaking, listening, and grammar. Inspired by a Monopoly-style choice menu of someone else's, I decided to use a game board format for my own. Each skill is a side (grammar is in the corners), and has its own color. Students are then free to choose the number and type of activities they want to complete by the end of the semester. If a student were to complete all of the activities, he/she would earn 120 extra credit points.
I designed this particular board for my high intermediate students (I hope to create at least three more boards, one for each of the proficiency levels I teach.). In creating the activities I consulted two different sets of objectives: seventh grade Common Core ELA and the Core Competencies for my department at the college where I teach. Here's a quick overview of the 20 activities: Reading
So how did I create this extra credit menu? In the most general terms, here are the steps I took:
I'm really excited about this particular project. It was a lot of work to put together but I believe it will be very valuable for my students. I especially like how it allows them to earn extra credit by participating in meaningful learning activities. Don't forget to download your own copy of English Skillology from Teachers Pay Teachers today--it's free!
In order to have students do the retelling portion of the assignment I would approach it in one of several ways. If the student is old enough to type, I might add a second slide that consists only of a text box before sharing the assignment. Then the student could, on the second slide, type out his/her retelling of the story. If the student wasn't able to, or didn't want to, type the story, I could instruct him/her to use the voice typing feature that is built into Google Slides to insert the retelling into the speaker notes (Tools-Voice Type Speaker Notes). Another option could be to use an add-on such as mote to leave voice comments. The possibilities truly are endless. Each set of sequencing sentences is available separately in paper or digital format. There are also discounted bundles that offer a single book paper + digital versions, all books paper versions, all books digital versions, and all books paper + digital versions. Check them out today! |
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