Here’s a very brief insight into some day-to-day EAL planning.
I work with EAL learners in Year 4. Planning for my EAL lessons is informed by one of the following:
In their literacy classes, students were learning to use fronted adverbials (was a new one for me tbh). They were also reviewing expanded noun phrases as part of the same activity – descriptive writing based on images.
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Someone contacted me last week in a panic. ‘Aaargh, we’re going to start using Seesaw – any tips? Is it easy? Can you do a lot on it?’ etc.
I find Seesaw really easy to use as a classroom learning app for EAL. The functionality for slides and templates is like a Jamboard +1 (you pay for the privilege). You can do quite a lot with it – here are some random (very random) screenshots from my Year 4/5 lessons just to give you a general idea. These aren’t all-singing-all-dancing, I just want to reassure the person who contacted me that things will be more familiar than you imagine.
In no particular order…
It’s really easy to model activities/tasks when not doing a live lesson. In this example, I wanted learners to predict the captions for a load of images. I can record myself doing the task and add a voiceover with instructions too (students just click play button to view).
This is a new series of blog posts for teachers looking to become materials writers. It aims to help future writers explore topics and issues in writing, encourage deeper insight into the content of published materials, and promote a principled approach to materials development.
Think…
To what extent do you agree with these statements?
Think of a clear example to support each of your responses.
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Yes, another Wordwall post. No, I’m not on commission. It’s just a great tool.
I forgot to mention the ‘Set Assignments’ feature in my previous posts. It’s a really useful diagnostic tool.
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.
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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Here’s a video-based intro for the topic of light and shadow (YLs). You may have seen this activity type on ELT Planning before:
This is just the starter activity (feel free to adapt). It can be a springboard to further discussion, inquiry, etc.
Hope it’s useful 🙂
Feature image: Mocomi video screenshot
