Alida came into my class yesterday and modeled to me how to implement some oral language lessons to help some of my ELL students and the whole class. The first activity was running dictation. Students were in groups and had one scribe, each child had a turn to run to the fence look at the word and run back to tell the scribe. It was a great example of bumping up students vocabulary and helping students remember difficult spelling words- some students who weren't sure how to spell the whole word just remembered chunks. Everyone had a go and it was great to see the children learning new vocabulary in a fun way. The next activity was around extending vocabulary. Students had one word on a piece of paper ' gobbling' and they had to use a thesaurus to find other words that meant the same as that word. This was amazing to see such an extension of students vocab. I can see how this could work in my class before any piece of writing. Students often will use words that are familiar to them 'we had fun' but getting them to experiment and explore other words will only extend their vocabulary. Overall a great lesson for ELL strategies and watching Alida model them made it easier for me to see how to use them in my own classroom.
So what?
Once a week we are going to do these oral language activities and I should see a shift in their writing vocabulary. I will comment on this reflection in a month and see if I have noticed any change in their vocabulary.
HI Becs
ReplyDeleteThank you for this reflection, I am glad that it was helpful. I used the ELL activities as a quick warm up activity, transitioning into formal writing lesson, and saw the vocabulary coming through in their writing. I would love to hear the outcome. A