Jamboard mentioned a lot recently. I decided to give it a go with my Secondary classes. Started using it last week so this is all new to me. Early thoughts.
Jamboard versus (e.g.) whiteboard.fi
This was the first step for me – working out which one I might find more useful. There were far more tools on whiteboard.fi (wait), but Jamboard won straight away because it integrates well with Google Classroom (wait), so that was that really.
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Here’s a quick speaking activity for Primary EAL. A good one for Friday afternoon fun.
Check out this ‘Hidden Words‘ post on Bored Panda. Is just a load of illustrations with six hidden words in each.
Get the students to spot the words, explain where they are, explain their meaning, look up their meaning if unsure, etc. Lots more language than I thought came out of this one, and the students took control of the activity! A nice one for fluency practice.
Here it is as a Powerpoint. All images (including feature) copyright Bored Panda, I just had to add it to a ppt because of adverts or suggested reads on their site being potentially iffy for YLs. Plus all the comments give the answers away!
Hiya, hope online learning is going well.
Here are some random reading tasks I set for homework. Each student chooses one of these to do a week. These are in a big folder on my desk, but they’ll be adapted for online learning now probs. Still, you might find them useful. Ten for fiction, six for non-fiction.
Most of these are well-known, so not all my ideas or anything. Examples:
Lockdown again 😦
Here’s a handout I gave to learners for self-study over Christmas. Might be useful now seeing as we’re going back to online learning. Ha, not as a handout obvs… Just the image!
Cheers.
Came across this post on my Google Drive. I think I wrote it with someone like NALDIC in mind, but not sure they responded/I sent it. It’s not the best, but if you’re interested in Brian Tomlinson’s work it might be of interest.
A text-driven approach: making reading more meaningful
There is far more to reading than just comprehension. When I first started teaching over a decade ago I felt that many global English language coursebooks tended to prioritise comprehension in reading sections. Resources these days seem to include more meaning-building tasks, such as those I outlined in this blog post, and those mentioned by Rachael Roberts. I find tasks that develop meaning-building skills are more engaging for my learners, as they are often more personalised, more challenging and give learners more chance to process a text.
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Year 9 Geography. The assessment task involves looking at the impact of tourism in Kenya. Some of my EAL learners are quite new to English, and their prior knowledge of Kenya is limited. They’re gonna need some support. I get two EAL lessons a week with these kids, and mainly use the time to help them access their learning in other subjects.
Before we get into the tourism side of things, we need to lay some foundations. We also need a fun activity – learning can be fun, right?
… Twinkl to the rescue!
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I wrote this lesson last year for the anniversary of the first moon landing. Decided to post it now for a few reasons:
Procedure
Cut up each task and stick them around the room. If you can’t be bothered and you have more tech available, have it as a doc to work through on Google Classroom (at links instead of QRs maybe).
Students work through the activities (devices needed), taking notes where relevant, building to the final task. It’s best to do the activities in order.
The final task involves writing a speech. You could change this – I only used that as it connected with some ‘YL Speaking Challenge’ at my school.
Here’s the doc. Fully editable – check for spelling mistakes:
Cheers, feedback welcome as always.
Image by WikiImages from Pixabay
Just a quick idea for a bit of video game chat. We did a 5-week module on the topic, this was my context builder. Took about an hour as the teens got into it.
Step 0: Lead-in questions if you want, like…
Alternatively, maybe do a picture dictation of a video game image below to get students talking, then elicit lesson topic.
Step 1: Hand out loads of screen shots of video games or put them around the room. I chose these eight:
Students look at images and discuss:
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Onestopenglish is still free at the moment. This is a great opportunity to make the most of their awesome resources. There’s so much available on the site: lesson plans, articles related to methodology, resources created by the Onestopenglish community… they’ve also been teaming up with institutions like NILE recently to provide tips for teachers.
I’ve written a few resources for site over the past year which I hope you will find interesting and useful. Most of them are for the Everyday Life series. They’re print-and-go adult General English resources, complete with teacher notes and student worksheets. These are often task-led and typically suit 1 – 1.5 hour lessons.
Everyday Life Lesson Topics:
Article /resource for the Online Education series:
Lesson Share Winning Resource:
Instant Coffee, a Black Mirror inspired short story with resources (for approximately three hours of class time)
Feedback on any of these resources is most welcome! I hope they come in handy for your own lessons.
Here are a couple of game-based resources you could use for EAL learners reading Varjak Paw. Our Year 4 students have really enjoyed the book (I did too, although I didn’t like the ending!).
Anyhow, here’s a Kahoot! to play at the end of the book:
Before reading, I found it useful to prime learners for some cat-specific vocab that might pop up!
Cat related words (one of my more random Wordwalls)
I anagrammed that one too, see here.
Also, here’s a hangman of terms from earlier in the book, things like Contessa, humiliation, fireplace, insect, guard, etc. I found that guessing these prompted some discussion, so you could use the activity to teach phrases for probably (It could be… Maybe it’s… It’s definitely….!).
