Mina was not here today, and Ronoldo did not go to the reading room, so the day was spent in the regular classroom. They had spent the majority of the past week working on an essay on a famous explorer that each was expected to write. I took him and a couple other students who needed extra time typing up their papers to the computer lab.
The assignment was very clear cut, and did an excellent job of explaining what the teacher expected from each paper. It had a list of every aspect, and a brief explanation of these sections. There were also some questions that were used to prompt the students’ responses to these.
Ronoldo’s paper was on Christopher Columbus, and in the fourty-five minutes we were in the lab, he barely finished his title page. Typing out the explorer’s and his names was excruciating, because he typed with one finger, and did not know where the keys were. It kind of made me want to take the keyboard from him and have him dictate his information to me while I typed.
He kept having issues with formatting, which I told him he could deal with at the very end. He did not seem to believe me, and spent a lot of time trying to get the right font and font size for his title page. To be fair, I was the same way at his age, and would drive my dad crazy while I formatted and reformatted each part of the paper.
I think that there may be an issue with ELLs learning how to type AND learn the English language. Writing it down is one thing, but typing is hard enough to learn as it is, especially to a fifth grader. I do not doubt that he was intimidated at all by the scale of this project, and the fact that he was required to type out the whole thing. I know I would have been, and am sometimes put off by this even now.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Finally updating (again) part 2
Finally updating (again)
I met the students in the reading room, where they were working on a worksheet to try to identify the subject and predicate of a number of sentences. The paper was set up so that it declared a statement, and then asked the students a question about what preformed the action in each. I know this is kind of confusing, but the best way to explain it would probably be that it was very formulaic, and consisted of statements like this: “Billy plays basketball every Thursday.” And then asked questions like “Who plays basketball every Thursday?” The answer obviously being Billy.
Mina had problems with this, most likely because she was overthinking the questions, which were very simplistic. Despite being very easy to those with better grasps on the English language, these questions were probably very helpful to those just beginning to learn. A few days after going to this placement, I got a similar worksheet from my Spanish teacher to help us identify direct and indirect objects. Maybe all this is helpful to ELLers.
After finishing going over their answers on this worksheet, they started one that helped them to identify the predicate. They were required to circle the predicate of various sentences. Originally they started to circle everything but the verb, but eventually figured out that the predicate is essentially the verb to the end of the sentence.
The next worksheet was one in which they had to decide whether a predicate or subject was required in a sentence with a blank, and then had to choose from a word bank (or phrase bank in the case of the predicates) The students seemed to have the most fun with this because they had more opportunities to be creative with their sentences, and it did not really matter which word or phrase they chose, as long as it was the correct missing aspect of the sentences.
Back in the general classroom, the Ronaldo and Mina were placed in a group with the two lower reading students, and the class went around to different stations. Their first station was with the teacher, where they began taking turns reading pages from the book, Dear Mr. Henshaw. I remember reading this book and enjoying it when I was about their age. It is a simple read, but a very good book. It is interesting because it is different than most, being that it is written as a series of letters that a child sends to his favorite author, Mr. Henshaw. Through these letters we learn more and more about the child and his life. After a round of reading, the teacher would ask a series of questions about what was happening in the book.
The next station the students went to was a partner reading area. They took turns reading paragraphs in the short story La Bamba, another story I had to read at their age. The kids almost fought to read and if one would start reading more than they were supposed to, the partner would interject immediately. Not soon after getting into this section, all the students were pulled out for some sort of guidance activity I believe.
