We'd had a particularly loquacious morning and so I was deliriously happy that our afternoon history lesson was an edpuzzle (more on this resource in another blog but the short version is that it is a video lesson with an embedded quiz--the kids put on headphones, listen to / watch a video and answer questions silently). We had the normal getting started chaos with slow computers, misspelled websites and other normal misadventures but soon everyone was settled and working and then it started. At first is was just a single finger tap: tap, tap, tap.....rather quiet and I chose to accept it for what it was, a thinking tick, and ignore it...then one of the boys started tapping his toe...then someone else started turning a pencil over-and-over-and-over...then someone else started popping their lips...another started to hum quietly and soon the room was overflowing with repetitive thinking noises and I was approaching insanity. I finally gave in and started making the rounds: putting this one's pencil on the desk, laying a hand on that one's shoulder and generally quieting them one-by-one. Once again peace reigned......for all of two minutes and then the toe started to tap again. All I could do was shake my head and think; "whack-a-student, you're just playing whack-a-student."
Last year a fellow teacher walked into lunch and declared, "I feel like I'm at the carnival playing that game where things pop up and you hit them with a mallet and make them go back down again. What's that called?" "Whack-A-Mole?" "That's it! I feel like I play whack-a-student all day long; I get one to sit down and start to work and another pops up." This year has definitely felt like a year of whack-a-student in my classroom. It's not that this group is particularly badly behaved, they really don't do anything out of the ordinary, it's more that there are more of them than usual and they have a lot to say...about everything not related to school.....all the time.....and when they aren't saying something they are making noises. This past Tuesday was a perfect example.
We'd had a particularly loquacious morning and so I was deliriously happy that our afternoon history lesson was an edpuzzle (more on this resource in another blog but the short version is that it is a video lesson with an embedded quiz--the kids put on headphones, listen to / watch a video and answer questions silently). We had the normal getting started chaos with slow computers, misspelled websites and other normal misadventures but soon everyone was settled and working and then it started. At first is was just a single finger tap: tap, tap, tap.....rather quiet and I chose to accept it for what it was, a thinking tick, and ignore it...then one of the boys started tapping his toe...then someone else started turning a pencil over-and-over-and-over...then someone else started popping their lips...another started to hum quietly and soon the room was overflowing with repetitive thinking noises and I was approaching insanity. I finally gave in and started making the rounds: putting this one's pencil on the desk, laying a hand on that one's shoulder and generally quieting them one-by-one. Once again peace reigned......for all of two minutes and then the toe started to tap again. All I could do was shake my head and think; "whack-a-student, you're just playing whack-a-student."
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When most teachers find out what I teach (ESL newcomers, immersion classroom--that's students who just arrived in the USA and speak no English in an English-only classroom for those of you who don't speak teacher) they get a look of awe/fear, probably similar to the one I give kindergarten teachers. I admit that my chosen specialty is difficult and there are days that I wish I could just talk to my students like a "normal" teacher, but then something happens and I remember why I love being my kids' "English-Mom", days like today...
Every year I have multiple languages represented in my classroom, and this year is no exception. Among my girls there are currently three languages: Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic. After the first week of school my girls got over being intimidated by each other and started using what little English they knew to communicate. Last week they got the brilliant idea to use Google translate to help them deepen the conversation (side note: Google translate is great for simple every-day sentences but please don't trust it for anything more than that, it's not an actual translator). They got out ChromeBooks and iPads and soon were typing away, switching languages and passing things around. The sound of middle school girls giggling was music to my ears and I pretended not to notice that very little (ok, no) science and math was getting accomplished. They've been "talking" ever since using this crazy mish-mash of translated languages and English. This morning my students (including the boys this time) kept yelling, "Kon'nichiwa!" (hello in Japanese) at K, my Chinese student. I finally stopped them and said, "That's Japanese, K is from China." It seems my students are worse at geography than I am because they were all convinced Japan is in China. OK, end of lesson on English question words, time for geography. That lead to lessons in how to say hello in Chinese and Arabic and Spanish. Not great for our English acquisition, but good for class moral and maybe (hopefully) they at least learned that Japan and China are two different countries. This newfound geographical knowledge had them all at the world map during passing time finding all of their countries and comparing geographical locations. I'm not sure what language we were all speaking by the end of it--it seemed to be some new language that combined Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic and English, but it sparked conversation and served to start tearing down barriers caused by unfamiliarity and a little fear. During advisory (glorified study hall) my girls continued talking and I continued pretending they were working on their math homework. Eventually they called me over with a question (the last time that happened I had to explain to them that for the translator to work you actually had to type out que {what in Spanish}, a simple k wouldn't work). It seems they had asked R why her family came to the USA from Syria and she'd told them that they came because of the war. When the translator translated war into Spanish it came out as "fight", which they knew didn't make sense, but they'd never heard this English word war before. I explained to them what a war was and once they understood they wanted to know more about it. I sent them back to R and she told them about some of her experiences and her brothers who had been killed. The next time I checked on them they were looking at pictures on Google images and had tears in their eyes. Then they started asking R about her hijab and discussing the differences between Islamic mosques and Catholic churches. By the time lunch was over they were back to giggling and talking about important topics (which boy in our class is the cutest) and I decided it was time to drag them back to schoolwork, but not before they all got their names written in English, Chinese and Arabic in their planners. Needless to say my girls learned a lot today. My girls from Mexico have seen their share of violence too, coming from small towns where the drug cartels rule without compassion, but K lived a very peaceful life in China, and none of them had any idea of what has been happening in Syria or around the globe. After their conversation this afternoon they have a bigger view of the world and a new understanding of how people can have very different backgrounds/languages/religions/everything but still be friends. Today was definitely one of those days that made remember why I chose the specialty I did and made me proud to be a teacher---even when I'm not the one doing the teaching. Science was my least favorite and least successful class when I was in school. I just didn't get it and despite the best efforts of several teachers there are some science things that I cannot do to this day (ie: balance a chemical equation). For these reasons I have avoided teaching science and the most nervous time of starting a new job was always the moment before the principal told me what I'd be teaching/supporting ("Please don't let him say science, please don't let him say science...."). I obviously did not fully think through the idea of self-containing our new arrivals and teaching all the core subjects because it turns out one of the four core subjects of school is science. So after years of praying and actively avoiding science class I have actually volunteered to teach one and to some degree I am terrified.
Thankfully this is beginning ESL science and most of what we are doing is vocabulary acquisition (and The Magic School Bus is all available on DVD!). Since so much of the content is outside of my comfort zone I decided to stay well within my wheel-house of activities. I took my standard vocabulary activities and applied them to science. I have developed several units including weather, ecology and animal taxonomy. While each bundle is slightly different they all include sort cards, clip cards and match up cards but there are slight differences, such as the classification/taxonomy unit including puzzles. Click the pictures before to check out the details of each unit. One of the things that I hated the most about teaching lower elementary (or "little people" as I like to call them) is the constant requests for help with basic tasks. "Miss, my shoe is untied Miss, I can't get the button on my jeans open and I have to go to the bathroom. Miss, I can't peel my orange." (side note to any parents who may be reading this: Please help your child's teacher: don't send your child to school wearing clothes he/she cannot deal with him/herself and, for the sake of teacher and lunch room monitor sanity everywhere, please either pre-peel their fruit or send fruit they can eat without extra steps.) Then of course there are the natural questions that come with the age and diminish as they learn: "Miss, what's this word? Miss, where is this place?" and my personal favorite, "Miss, what time is it?" These questions are natural, normal and excellent ones for little people to ask and by second or third grade students learn the skills necessary to answer them on their own. My first official act as program coordinator was to reassign myself from little people to middle school and then go out and hire a top-notch little people teacher. I was very excited to be back in the land of medium to big people and free of many of the care-taking duties. Of course I still get some of the same questions (no joke, I've had 7th and 8th graders ask me to tie their shoes for them) but the answers have changed; rather than helping the child to complete the task I usually remind them that they are not in kindergarten anymore and send them off to "figure it out" for themselves (I think this is the real reason so many teens walk around with untied shoelaces--they never learned how to tie them and no one will do it for them at this late stage of life.). One question that drives me absolutely batty though is "Miss, what time is it?" or the response of "I was just checking the time!" when I tell them to put the phone away. The fact that there is a huge clock on the wall is not a good reason to leave their phone in their pocket because they cannot read an analog clock and see no point in learning how. Some teachers deal with this by putting a digital clock in their classrooms. I am not so kind, I believe children should learn to read an analog clock and I plan to, under the guise of vocabulary instruction, teach mine how to do so this year (of course right after I decided this the district announced new clocks are going in every classroom and they are digital but it still doesn't change the fact that students need this skill). Since this year most of my students will be self-contained with me we are going back to my elementary roots as far as scheduling and classroom procedures go. I'm also trying to do as much cross-curricular work as possible so students work with the same vocabulary set in as many situations as possible (remember it takes meeting a word at least 10 times in meaningful context to really learn it). Our unit on time will be no exception. We'll have the normal clock vocabulary work, counting by 5's, 15's and 30's, and of course we'll get into elapsed time (because I need another reason to bang my head against the wall) but I've included a couple of cross-curricular activities as well.
One of the benefits of designing and implementing a new program model is no one can say, "Did you follow the approved district curriculum?" First of all, I am on the district curriculum overhaul team and supposed to be adjusting it (of course we're not scheduled to get to the ESL curriculum until 2018 sometime, but I'm just getting a head start). Second, this is a new program model so there is no approved curriculum! But before the curriculum directors out there get really scared, I promise my scope and sequence was viewed and approved by all department heads and I am generally basing all lessons off of a research-based CCSS / NGSS based curriculum series. Even still there are some topics that newly arrived ESL students need to be taught that just do not appear anywhere in secondary level curricula, so some creative planning was in order. Next year we are going to starting our social studies curriculum with a unit on economics. Very impressive sounding, right? In reality we are going to be learning the names and values for all USA coins. I have told my students for years (every time we study integers) that I want to do business with them because they have no idea how to figure money, but in their defense how would they? They just arrived in a new country and they carry around these crazy coins that are mostly the same color, come in all different sizes (which doesn't correlate at all with their value) and no one takes the time to teach them about the values of them. Years after arrival it's not unusual to hear an English language learner refer to a dime as the "ten coin". Then they come to school and have to take a standardized test and it gives them what is considered a very easy question: "Click on all the quarters." They don't know what a quarter is, look it up in the bilingual dictionary and find out that it is 1/4 or 25% and still can't pick out the correct coin. The student guesses in order to move on and their overall math score drops like a rock to a kindergarten or first grade level preventing them from gaining access to the more advanced courses. For their own sake, and the health of my annual evaluation score which is now largely based on test scores, I aim to end this phenomena and help my students identify and work with coins. My unit includes a lot of great activities I've used in the past, which are described in my blog from 2014, but of course I had to add some fun new activities--four to be exact! All of the activities are available for individual purchase in my shop (just click the links or pictures in this post), or you can buy all of them (at a discount) in the USA Coin Activity Bundle. The first new activity is a set of clip cards. Each of the 16 cards have the four main coins along the edges and an amount in the center. When we use clip cards in my class I just put the cards in a pile in the math center (or pass a set out to each student) and provide a big basket of clothes pins. The students then look at the value in the center and place clothes pins on the various coins in order to make the correct total. While students work I generally circulate and check the cards they've finished, making a pile of the ones they've completed correctly and giving them back cards they need to fix. Sometimes I also encourage the students to check each other's work in order to help move the process along. The second activity was actually inspired by a coin purse in a store and a movie about a pig farmer (I know--weird, but I'll take inspiration anywhere I can get it). Somehow in my mind the two things got jumbled together and I was thinking about how pigs get very hungry and need to be fed and how if the pig was actually a piggy bank it would need to be fed coins instead of slop. Thus the Hungry Piggy Banks matching activity was born! There are 18 banks with values on them and 18 coin purses was various coins on them. In order to feed each pig the proper amount of food (yes, I really will say it that way to my middle school students--they love it when I act stupid, it gives them a chance to practice their eye rolling skills) students must match the value on the pig to the correct coin set on the purse.
The final new activity is a set of Match Up Cards to go with the boards my dad created for me (see the blog post by clicking the link). The first card asks students to match the name with the front and back of each coin/bill. The second card asks them to match the name with the value and the number needed to make a dollar I print the cards, laminate them and cut on the marks. Then I slide them into the boards and students use rubber bands to match the terms on the left with the picture / information on the right. If you choose to print the cards double-sided the center section can be slid out, flipped and reinserted to form an answer key. I generally don't do this because my students have a habit of using this for purposes other than checking their work and it doesn't take me long to just do a quick check when they finish, or they can always trade boards with another student. Did I go a little coin crazy? Probably, but it really is an important set of vocabulary words and I think it is worth it. Hopefully this little 2-3 week unit will help my students in a very practical way, and if it improves their standardized test scores a bit too I won't complain!
This activity is one that I made several years ago to practice end punctuation. I had found an activity on-line that challenged kids to look through a picture book or short story and make a bar graph of the end punctuation they found. The kids and I did this individually and then we combined our graphs into a big class graph. It was great graphing practice and helped them pay attention to how often the different end punctuation marks were used, but it didn't do much for helping them determine when to use each mark. The kids loved revisiting some of the books we'd read that year and having familiar reading material lowered their anxiety about working with an entire book. I decided to take this idea and build on it. I made a quick trip to Dollar Tree and bought colored craft sticks (a different color for each student, I ended up with 6 sets) and clothes pins. On each craft stick I wrote sentences from some of our favorite books but left the end punctuation off. On each clothes pin I put either a period or a question mark. Everything then went into our center: the craft sticks in piles by color and the clothes pins in a big bucket. During their center time the kids would read the sentences and add the appropriate end mark by clipping it to the end of the craft stick. If they got stuck they could always skim back through the books to get an idea of what to do. The practice was great and the kids and I still enjoy using the activity each year.
What a crazy year 2015-2016 was! My class sizes literally doubled, I had new curriculum (no surprise there), developed a multi-grade math class and volunteered (was volun-told?) for several new committees; and that was just the professional changes! The end result was a great school year, a lot of stretching and professional learning and almost no time for blogging. I'm hoping to get back to it this summer and be more consistent next year, but not sure that will happen. The reason for my doubt is that there are more changes coming my way: I'm getting married in October, trialing a self-contained new comers class (which includes writing multi-grade curriculum for two new subjects and developing a combined curriculum for a third) and returning to school.
I am very excited about this new self-contained class that I'll be teaching. My district, and the middle school especially, has had an ever increasing number of new immigrant students and our older learners are really struggling to adapt and survive in the general education classrooms. This class will allow them to continue their academic progress while simultaneously developing their English language skills. It's also great because starting as early as this fall, definitely within the next two years, we are going to be welcoming and caring for a large group of Syrian refugees! I'm looking forward to having students from that part of the world again. I love my Hispanic students but the last two years have held a certain amount of culture shock for me as my previous students were almost exclusively from Muslim countries in the middle east and Indian subcontinent region. I think my current students will really thrive with the new program, and it's very good to have it in place and start working the kinks out before our refugees arrive. In preparation for the class I'm spending a good chunk of my summer developing a new comer's science and social studies curriculum as well as figuring out the most important units from the three grades of math curriculum and how best to present them to the students. I have a general curriculum map made and I'm ready to start on the scope and sequence. After that it'll be time to lesson plan until the cows come home! The goal is to have 2-3 units for every subject (English, math, science, social studies, reading) complete and ready to go before I go back to school in August. Hopefully I won't have to do much in the way of lesson planning until after Thanksgiving so I can concentrate on the wedding and being back in school myself (adding a couple content area endorsements, no degrees this time) this fall.
About a month ago I went to EdCamp at Schoolcraft College. It was great and not just because they gave us totally free SCECHs (though that was certainly a highlight)! One of the things I was introduced to was Thing Link, a website that allows students to create interactive images using hot spots. The students pull an image from the web (or upload one from the computer) and then create hot spots (dots) that when you mouse over them expand into text, another image, a document link, or combinations of different things. There is a free and a paid version, but I decided to start with the free version. I was actually so excited that I immediately adjusted my lesson plan and tried one the next week.
With much fear and trepidation I did my first Thing Link project with my lowest proficiency vocabulary class. I really didn't want to start with these students (fearing teaching them new technology as well as making them do a report in English), but they were the only class at the end of a unit and scheduled to do a writing project. They were already working on creating reports about their home countries using a graphic organizer I found on-line (though the website seems to have been taken down). Instead of having the students write a formal paper, I introduced them to Thing Link and they created their own image reports. They were amazing! I don't know why I ever feared teaching the kids a new technology, I showed them what to do, helped them get their first image imported and start their first hot spot, and then sat at my desk and graded papers while they went at it---yes, I actually got to sit for more than 30 seconds! They had a blast and I did not hear a single word of complaint in any language! That's right, you read correctly, my newest arrival students wrote a complete country report, in English, with pictures, and did not complain once! Was it a full page, paragraphed report with citations? No, but they're not at that stage of writing, they're still working on writing complete sentences. You can check out the report on Honduras for yourself, just click the word Honduras. After the success with my new arrivals, I decided to give Thing Link another go and expanded to my "advanced" class. These students are actually at an intermediate level of proficiency (WIDA level 2.5-3.0), but their writing skills are still quite low (WIDA level 1.5-2.0). A week or so ago we finished a unit on immigrants and their final project was to be a biography report. The students looked through the immigrants on biography.com and chose one to research. My original plan was to have them create a biography circle report, but I changed it to be a Thing Link report. Normally this project produces days of whining and an increase in my aspirin consumption, but this time I didn't hear a single word, not even a "Do I have to answer all of the questions?"! The success level was a little more varied, but in their defense I was at a conference and meetings for three out of the six class periods they were given to work on the project. The students were able to produce some good reports though, as evidenced by this one on Albert Einstein, which was actually done by the lowest proficiency student in this class! Time to run the new project checklist: 1. Were students able to complete the project? Check! 2. Were the learning objectives attained? Check! 3. Did the project integrate technology and 21st Century skills? Check! 4. Was administration happy and impressed? Check! 5. Level of complaining and need for cajoling to work at an acceptable level? DOUBLE CHECK--No complaining or need cajole at all and students even worked with a higher-than-average diligence while with a substitute! 6. Students rated project as "I guess so" or higher on the "Would you want to do this again?" scale? DOUBLE CHECK, they actually asked when we're going to do another one without being prompted! Final evaluation of project: TOTALLY WORTH IT! This year my class sizes doubled and I got a new curriculum. I love my new students, and the new curriculum is actually really cool and exactly what I wanted (ok, so I picked it out, wrote the grant to purchase it, ordered it, and then bribed the secretary to hide it under the box of broken manual pencil sharpeners until I could come pick it up, but still I got books--good books), but it all added up to a lot of work and not a lot of time for creating new materials. I've finally caught up a bit and had some time to get back to expanding lessons with new activities.
So what's next for me and my darlings? Well I finished our scope and sequence based on the book I have been teaching out of for my absolute beginners (National Geographic Cengage's Inside, orange book A, it replaced their Inside the USA purple book) and realized that no where in the book is there a unit for learning parts of the body. We have a unit on adjectives and describing people, a unit on family relationships, and all kinds of other great stuff, but nothing on parts of the body. So what's a teacher supposed to do? Of course the official answer is follow the curriculum, track with Atlas Rubicon! And of course that's what I'm doing, I'd never think of doing something other than what I've been told to do.....Oh wait, the curriculum isn't aligned with Atlas and I'm on the committee tasked with revamping Atlas. So if I think through this logically, that means if I deviate from the curriculum and insert an extra unit I'll actually be doing exactly what the district asked me to do---revamp the official Atlas curriculum! (Yeah, I'm on the data team too, we're experts at spinning things to say what we need them to say.) The bottom line is that I've added an extra unit to the curriculum (seriously---how are they supposed to write descriptions of people when they haven't been taught the names of body parts???) and we're going to be learning the parts of the body. We have vocabulary sort cards (they double as a Memory-style game), a board game, crossword puzzles, a labeling activity, and plans for some fun craftivities (trace your partner and label all the parts, create a monster, etc.), and even a couple writing activities with Mr. Potato Head. I'm hoping the students will have a ton of fun working with them, I know I did putting everything together for them! |
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