Chapter Two
I am truly inspired by Lenny's desire to gain more knowledge about his student's backgrounds. Although it was sparked by the new student, Ka's, arrival, I think it was a really useful teaching strategy to encourage students to learn more about their own ancestry. By having students learn about their own culture and their journey to America, I think that it creates more of a equal playing field; it allows students to relate to each other in some way which might make an ELL student feel more comfortable. It also provides a learning experience for Lenny and gives him insight into both Ka and his other student's background. As a teacher, I think that this is important because it might help you to identify why students are having certain issues.
For example, when I was working with the ELI as a conversation partner, I learned that the Korean student I was talking with typically had problems with forming sentences in English because sentences are broken down to subject-verb-object in English and subject-object-verb in Korean. This kind of knowledge can be learned through your own research or by assigning students to research specific areas in their own culture.
I also really liked the idea of pairing ELL students with stronger native speaking partners. It gives students the opportunity to communicate with others and receive feedback from their peers. Peer partnering can also help students to become more involved in the classroom environment and encourage them to learn to be actively engaged in a low-stress setting.
Chapter Three
This chapter also had a lot of valuable information for helping ELL students to comprehend more in the classroom. I especially like how Jeff began his unit with something that caught all of his students attention. The activity wasn't something that required a high level of language comprehension, instead it was an activity that grabbed his students attention and made learners of all language proficiencies want to start the unit.
Throughout the Stone Fox unit, Jeff combined multiple teaching strategies such as read-alouds, movie viewings, and power words to help students understand the story on a more specific level and as a whole. I also found that the book response journal entries were very useful. I think that they encouraged the students to really invest in the story which makes it easier for them to be interested in the rest of the lessons. The power words might not have been as effective if Jeff simply wrote them on the board and didn't require the students to actively use them. The journal entries are a place where students can synthesize all of the materials that they have been engaged with and it provides a specific place for them to put down their thoughts. Also, writing about their experiences with the story or how it relates to their life can encourage the students to participate in whole-class discussions because they already have something prepared - it takes away some of the anxiety!
Besides explaining how a multitude of materials can effectively be used in the classroom, I really liked how this chapter addressed the issue of a teacher's personal time. It made me think about how much planning actually has to go into each lesson in order to ensure that student progress is made. At the same time, it also made me realize that in order to be an effective teacher, we have to be able to take time for ourselves or else we might get burnt out a little too soon.
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