Slavery Tear Ups

Last summer, I attended a workshop presented by Margarita Calderon. The focus of the workshop was teaching English Language Learners. During the workshop we did an activity called Tear Up. The focus of the activity is writing. Students are asked to create an image using construction paper, however they can only tear the paper. (No scissors allowed.). After the image is created, they must then write a story about the image. The image serves as the brainstorming and helps them gather their thoughts. I posted about this workshop here.

My scholars have been learning about slavery in social studies. They learned about how Africans were traded to Europeans for guns, shipped across the Atlantic on slave ships, sold and bought at slave auctions, and forced to work against their will. As a wrap up for the unit, I decided to introduce the tear up activity. (I have a pretty creative bunch of students this year so I knew they would come up with great images.)

I placed them into random groups. Their instructions were to create a tear up image based on something they learned during the slavery unit. After the images I instructed them to take the perspective of the slaves in their picture and write a story from their point of view. This is what they came up with.

Slaves taken from slave ships to slave auction

Slaves chained together on slave ship

Slaves working on plantation

Africans being traded for guns

Slave auction

I love how each group naturally came up with a different scene. And their images turned out great. I will definitely be using the tear up activity again.

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.

Teaching English Language Learners

About 50% of my school population are students who are learning English as their second language. Many of them started at the school with little or no English proficiency. Therefore we have to not only focus on teaching the academic content, but also the basics of the English language. This is a huge focus at my school, which is why we are extremely fortunate to have an on-site training by an expert on the topic. Margarita Calderon is presenting a workshop on strategies we can use to help our ELLs acquire English while still focusing on academic content. Her book is pictured below.

A major focus is vocabulary acquisition. She discusses the three different tiers of words.

Tier 1 - basic words, usually words that you can associate with a picture, i.e. book, school, teacher
Tier 2 - everyday words and phrases, homophones, homonyms, idioms, metaphors, transitional phrases, multiple meaning words, etc.
Tier 3 - content specific vocabulary

It is crucial that we teach all 3 tiers of words, but focus on tiers 2 and 3. By explicitly teaching vocabulary we are giving students the words that will help them learn the language as well as the content.

All of the strategies that we learned/practiced today gives the learners several opportunities to interact with the text as well as with their classmates. It is also very important that students, especially ELLs, are given the opportunity to practice using the language so we were given several examples of sentence frames that we could use in our classrooms. I have used sentence frames in my classroom before, but I will make sure I use them more often.

Today was a learning experience. Tomorrow is day 2 and the focus will be writing. I am looking forward to tomorrow. I will be back tomorrow to discuss how it goes.

If you have ELLs in your classroom, I highly recommend you read Margarita Calderon's book. There are a lot of good strategies to use that will benefit all learners.