English Language Learners Day 2

Today was the second half of the English Language Learners Workshop. See Teaching English Language Learners for information on the first day.

Today our focus was writing. We did several activities.

Write Around - Students work in cooperative groups of 4. Each student gets a piece of paper and they are given the beginning of a topic sentence. Our sentence starter today was Humans are a major cause of global warming due to ____________. Each student is asked to complete the sentence starter. When finished with the first sentence they pass the paper to the next person in the group. Each student reads what was previously written and adds another sentence on that paper, then passes the paper. This continues for a given amount of time. Once you signal them to stop, the read each of the compositions and select the best in the group. You can then use that composition to practice editing and revising.

This activity should be done after reading a text and the topic should be text related so that the students can use what they read to help generate ideas. It helps ELLs because they are able to see the flow of writing from their peers and are encouraged to use the tier 2 and tier 3 vocabulary words they learned from the text. (See day 1 for information on tiered vocabulary words.)

Tear Up - Tear Up was my favorite activity of the day. Students are given pieces of constuction paper and tear it up into pictures/symbols. They can be given a specific topic, be based on a text, or be of their choosing. It all depends on what the purpose of the lesson is. After they create the pictures, they glue them down and write their own story about the pictures. They are once again required to use the learned tiered vocabulary.

Here are the criteria we were given.
- Narrative writing
- Conflict about rules at school
- Must include dialogue
- Must include at least 5 of the given tier 2 and 3 words

Here is what we came up with. There were 5 groups. (Sorry if the some of them are difficult to read.)

I really enjoyed the workshop these last two days and look forward to using these activities this school year.

If you want more information about Margarita Calderon click on the link.