What worked today...what didn't.

"Mrs. Bowman, you are my people!" That's what one of my students said to me today when I tried to redirect him to question the people in his group instead of me by saying, "I don't know, buddy. I'm not in your group. Ask your people." There comes a really cool point in every school year when the language of many of my students has developed to the point that they can be intentionally funny. Love it. The other day, I asked someone to do something, and another student chimed in, "Me, too!", and a third chimed in, "Me, three!" And the whole class laughed. How cool is that?

After having read Walqui's book, I have started to think more about how to develop group interaction in the tasks I design for the class and how to mix in content instruction with language accuracy and language fluency. I also want to do my best to draw on all four skills during every class day in a very intentional way.

Some things that worked really well today:

Reinforcement of the content vocabulary: Students started studying the content vocabulary words (precipitation, evaporation, condensation, etc.) yesterday. I was surprised when even my strongest students weren't able to pronounce the vocabulary in any recognizable way. Hmmmm. So what worked? I found a song on the water cycle on a video, and I printed out the lyrics for the tune with the exception of the content words. I left those as blanks in the work, and the students listened on their individual computers.  The fact that it was a song made it easy for the students to sing along, and by the end of the activity, I had nearly perfect pronunciation of all the vocabulary words. Not so original, but it worked today.

Here's the water cycle song. It's not on youtube. That would go in the list of things that didn't work well today. YouTube wasn't working at school this morning, so I needed to find the video elsewhere. Slight panic.

Reinforcement of pronunciation: Found this app, Songify on Daniel Bemiss' blog. After the kids did the listening exercise (and singing exercise, really...wish I could have caught the off-key singing. Nothing is better than off-key singing in a room full of kids wearing headphones), they hopped on the iPads. This app allows users to read up to sixty seconds of text, and it converts it to a rap/r&b/"I'm so not cool that I don't even know the style of music" song. So the students got to listen to themselves reading the first stanza of the song from the video into their iPads. Pretty darn cool. (Free app, too!)

Production of academic language: In our afternoon task, I put the key vocabulary from the unit on the boards around the room. In their small groups, students were directed to write three sentences on the board that were related to the content vocabulary. They were supposed to produce something original. Then we rotated through and each group had to work on the next board. Below is a picture of what the three groups produced on one board:

Cool stuff about this activity? No notes. So the kids did all the negotiating in oral English to produce these sentences. No teacher intervention. There's some serious content vocabulary happening here! My favorite thing is the thinking beyond the class-delivered definitions. Gotta love the sentence about the bicycle!

One thing that didn't work well today:

Grouping: It's important to be intentional in grouping, and the groups I put together for the afternoon didn't work as I wanted them to. One had a funky boy/girl dynamic going on. And another had a girl who seemed to have the marker in my hand every time I turned around. Must remember to front-load activities with a little bit of a caveat to ensure everyone writes.

Next up: CLIMBS day 4 tomorrow. Version 3.0. Every time we run this workshop, we run it differently. Same content, different methods. I'm kind of fired up about tomorrow.