Winter Break for Literacy Class

My literacy class this semester is pretty high. Usually they can handle an ESL Literacy Reader in the range of levels C and D from the School of Global Access. It takes us five days to get from vocabulary introduction to fluent reading of a book. But this teaching week has only four days, one of which will be eaten up by special activities on the last day before winter break.

I asked students if they would like to tackle a very low level book and practice that language for three days. They agreed, so I printed out the newer version of my Winter Break book, which can be downloaded from https://www.kellymorrissey.com/dates-holidays.html.

Today we did warm-up activities to activate schemata and prior knowledge. Basically, that means we had a big chat and wrote words on the board, pulled up images from the internet, and got oriented to the concepts. We talked about the fact that there is free outdoor public skating downtown and that one can borrow skates at the church across from the skating rink. With that discussion as a springboard, I segued into projection of the images in this book. We talked about each picture and began to formulate sentences about each one. Finally, I gave each student a copy of the 8-page book (it requires only two sheets of paper) and started to print our co-written sentences on the projected version on the board for them to copy. I guess most students are ready for that break, as they did not opt to create long sentences or anything extra.

I'm glad that I left some images without colour. By passing out boxes of pencil crayons, I provided fast finishers with something to do while they waited for slower classmates to finish copying the sentences.

A tool I could not teach without is SpellingCity. At the start of the week, I load our 10-12 new words and customize the sentences so that learners encounter the same words and sentences in all the games. They are the words and sentences from our reader of the week. Once I've invested that time in loading the sentences, I can pull up games in the classroom, assign spelling tests and games to be done in the lab on lab day, and print a variety of worksheets all week long--such as word unscramble, sentence unscramble, missing letter, and a worksheet for matching sentences with missing words.

Tuesday we will conduct a peer survey to find out how everyone plans to spend the 17-day break. Here is the peer survey template in case you would like to have it on your own Google Drive to print or edit.

Our usual routine is to follow a peer survey by making oral sentences about each other. This is when we get practice with third person singular and plural, negative and positive statements. Finally, students turn their peer survey forms over to find that I've provided them with a page of blank lines on which to write sentences. Together we come up with sentences that summarize our peer survey results, always making sure we have at least one example for third person singular positive and negative, and at least one for a plural subject, positive and negative. Language is so much easier for the brain to retain when we personalize and talk about ourselves, not about Kim and Ben in some far-off place called Hill Street (though I do appreciate those books, too).

For the rest of the short week, we will continue to read our little book in a variety of ways. Sometimes we'll read chorally or repeat after the teacher. At other times we will read silently or in a small peer reading circle. By the end of the week, most students will be ready to volunteer to read entire pages aloud for the class. Nobody is ever forced to. It's always okay to pass.

In years past, I have been very ambitious. Once the class even made gingerbread! Not this year.

How is your class gearing up for winter break?

A Canadian History Resource for CLB 4 and Higher

Do you--or do your students--sometimes find history to be boring?

My class was anything but bored when we undertook the gargantuan task of studying the history of Canada beginning with the early migrations of the people we now refer to as First Nations and Inuit and ending at Confederation. We certainly could have kept going, but we were worn out!

The class was a multi-level seniors class, a group that loves to take things slowly and really delve deeply into the subject matter, not just memorize key dates for a test.

With their goals in mind, we decided to create a timeline. Each student took responsibility for one or two events, never racing ahead to historical events not yet covered in class. The timeline started out with a cluster of pictures at the far left end followed by a vast expanse of blank paper. Week by week, the learners sourced images, wrote captions, and decided where on the butcher paper to place their contributions.

Using tiny 3M Command® Hooks and equally tiny bulldog clips, we hung our very long timeline on the classroom wall near the ceiling. This allowed us to review what we'd learned in prior lessons while building on that knowledge as we inched our way through the decades. The photos you see here were snapped much later--after the project was concluded and the timeline was about to be rolled up and put away.

We took this series of units, which included reading a little book about Laura Secord, at our own pace. None of the seniors was in any hurry to pass an exam. They wanted the opportunity to acquire the related language and concepts--the knowledge.

For me the most fascinating chapter in our journey back in time was the unit we did on L'anse aux Meadows. I've shared about that on this blog before (December 2014), but I think it's worth sharing again now that I have a few more readers.

The centrepiece of our lesson was a rather long documentary about the national historic site L'anse aux Meadows. I found it fascinating. If you would like to watch the video and then take the Ted Ed lesson that I designed to accompany the video, you can do that HERE.

If you want to download the little quiz my students completed while watching the video, you can find it on my website www.kellymorrissey.com under FREE - Settlement Themes - Canada.

If this blog post inspires you in any way, I hope you'll leave a comment.

Cheers!

Time for a little Fun!

Because it was our goal to wrap up all artifact collection before the start of Ramadan (and also early enough to leave time for binder review, student-teacher conferences, progress reports and data collation by admin in June), I get to spend the last three weeks with my learners just exploring language in fun ways with them without the stress of another assessment around every corner.

It feels so good.

Also, the weather is now perfect for field trips.

And so I find myself so full of ideas, I can't plan or execute them all fast enough. One of the ideas that is blowing my little mind comes from a recent TESL Ontario blog post by John Allan entitled, "Change the Routine without Disrupting the Class - Take a Virtual Field Trip."

Have you heard of Google Expedition? I had never heard of it before I read John's post. I already have three Google Cardboard viewers en route to my home. I'll have the whole summer to play with them and think up ways to incorporate their use into English lessons.

In the meantime, while I dreamt about those little viewers being shipped to me, I've been working on lesson materials for an upcoming trip to Windsor Sculpture Park, an open-air art gallery stretching for ten kilometres along the Detroit River. My class will visit a small sampling of about a dozen works close enough for a self-paced walking tour that takes no more than two hours to complete, even with rest breaks at shady picnic tables with water and snacks.

I've spent today putting together a little booklet of activities, including a jigsaw. I'm looking forward to tomorrow!

If you are a Windsor teacher and would like to use this booklet, give me a shout.

Canada with CLB 1L

I don't usually teach "Canada and Citizenship" at the literacy level. However, this time around I, without giving it much thought, used an off-the-shelf pictorial needs assessment document instead of the usual one that I have customized for my learners. The one I got from a resource on Tutela.ca includes Canada as an option; of course that was the students' top pick.

Somehow, as a result of a mix of desperation and serendipity, I found a way to make the lessons come to life.

For the first week's module, we made a little six-page reader with the basics. I projected the book with blank lines up on the board and elicited the language, helping with grammar. Then students copied our sentences under the pictures in their own booklets.

This was the last time this group used primary penmanship lines. Our next module we graduated to regular lined sheets without the middle dotted guideline. They were pleased.

For week two, we took a little break from the map of Canada in order to incorporate a real-world task, map skills. This was done for the sake of an artefact for their portfolios and turned out to be an engaging module heavy on kinaesthetic means of learning; we turned the classroom into the streets and avenues of downtown Windsor. Students became fluent in giving and receiving directions to a few key landmarks around the core.

Back to the bigger map of Canada, learners made posters to help them remember which industries and foods are produced in each region.

We also started practicing offering, accepting, and declining food--a useful language function as newcomers make their first friends in Canada.

After days and days of practice with the rather large set of new terms, we made a video of our "Touring Canada through Food" party. The final test was closer to CLB 2 than 1, and all the class veterans aced it! Thirteen questions with NO images to support. They rocked it.

To finish off the theme, we picked out tourist post cards for one another, wrote little messages on them, addressed them to one another (for real), and asked the kind teacher to mail them.

A typical message went something like this:

Dear Ali,
Today I visited Niagara Falls. It is beautiful.
Your friend, Marwan.

Perhaps not this weekend, but very soon I will try to get the materials and checklists/rubrics for PBLA assessment onto my website for you to download and use.

Meanwhile, I have just uploaded other free materials for teaching housing HERE. Scroll down to "A Crack in the Tub."

I hope you're enjoying your teaching week. I sure enjoyed mine!

Halloween Story and Activity Pack for ESL Literacy

Welcome, ESL teachers!

I have just uploaded a new story and activity pack to www.kellymorrissey.com under LITERACY - Dates and Holidays. It is a very short little story about Sam and his Superman costume that can serve as the basis for a module this week as we get our newcomer clients ready for this Canadian cultural phenomenon that is Halloween and trick-or-treating.

I hope you like it!

page 1 of 2 of story

As always, please leave a comment if you use the story and if you have any suggestions for making the activity pack better, especially if you find an error or typo in it! Because it's in MS Word, you are also free to edit it yourself before you use it.

By the way, I do actually have another class that is not literacy; I will eventually once again share resources for CLBs three and four. However, it seems that ESL literacy teachers are the ones facing the direst need for appropriate materials with Canadian content.

Cheers!

Kelly

How Do You Build Modules?

Since this weekend marks the end of one month and the beginning of another, I have spent much of my day completing my September reports and designing the modules for October. I thought you might like a peek in side my brain too see how I go about the planning. In a future post, I can share all the materials I created to make one of these modules come together in the classroom.

I begin by looking at our needs assessment, which looks something like this. This time around students want to learn about food first. Thanksgiving and Halloween fall in October, so this aligns nicely with food as a month-long theme.

My rough plan looks like this:

October 3-7: Share a simple recipe for acorn squash with tie-in to Canadian Thanksgiving; make a Language Experience Approach book when we cook and eat the squash.
October 11-15: Skill building, vocabulary building around food staples and making a shopping list
October 17-21: Our recipes (help students choose a recipe to present to the class using colour pictures and large poster paper, markers). Make a Language Experience Approach book about our recipes.
October 24-29: Food safety and Halloween. Make masks from paper plates and go to Maria's room to "trick or treat." Her students will come to us, as well.

For each week-long module, I will plan the lessons by working backward from the end objectives. I will mentally tease them apart, asking myself what skills we need to build before attempting the task. I also layer modules this way, so that the skills acquired one week help learners with the following week's objectives. For example, a module with the objective of making a doctor's appointment could be preceded by a module on calendar and clock skills, one on the body and one on symptoms. Each module has its own objectives, but they also build toward being able to perform a final real-world task.

Each week I will introduce no more than twelve new words and twelve terms recycled from a previous module. We will spend the entire week working with this language, creating as many linguistic affordances as possible for the learners. I will try, though it is not my strong area, to give each lesson and each module a kinaesthetic component. For example, we will really prep and cook a squash using the microwave off room 105. During week two, the classroom will look like a grocery store, with food packages all over the place! During week three we will use glue, pictures, and markers to make our posters. During week four we will check actual bags of candy for allergies, ingredients that are not Halal, and will throw out suspect items with broken packaging.

Of course the LEA books will make the language so much more meaningful. Students love to see themselves portrayed in the books. "We wash our hands (picture). Hanaa cuts the squash (picture). Mukai mixes the spices (picture). AnLe puts in the butter (picture).  And so on. This becomes our little reader for the week. With lots and lots of daily practice reading it in 20-minute sessions--chorally, individually and in pairs, most learners can read it with fluency by Friday.

When I sit down to fill out my module planning form for my supervisor and our funder, IRCC, it helps me find the gaps in my plan and flesh out a more detailed syllabus for the month that includes activities designed to give learners opportunities to gain specific competencies. This is also when I will think about when assessments will take place and how.

How about you? How do you plan lessons and modules?

Still Seeking Non-Traditional Families

Two families have volunteered so far for my project to put together some LINC classroom materials that reflect the full diversity of Canadian families: one child-free by choice couple and one same sex couple who love their doggies!

I would like to have four or five families before I put the booklet together. Since I do not yet have any transgendered individuals nor any children yet in the selection of families, it sure would be nice to find families that reflect those facets of our beautiful Canadian society so we can introduce those individuals' faces and stories to our newcomer English language learners.

If you live in Canada and would like to volunteer for this project, please contact me. Helping is easy. All I need are a couple of high-definition photos of your family doing whatever it is they do--like engaging in a favourite hobby or relaxing together on the weekend. I also would appreciate a short blurb about the family. Whether you mention what it is that makes your family different from the gender binary heteronormative stereotype is entirely up to you.

If you're not up for having your picture seen or your family portrayed, you can still help by printing out and posting my flyer on a bulletin board at your workplace, church, mosque, synagogue, community centre, university, etc.

The flyer can be downloaded from HERE.

Thank you so much! I hope you're enjoying your winter break, if you get one.

The Holidays are Coming!

With the holiday season just around the corner, I've started units on shopping and gift giving in both my morning and afternoon classes.

My multi-level seniors have expressed a desire to learn more about Canadian culture, so I thought a lesson about culturally appropriate gifts might interest them, and it did!

I was pleased to find a good resource for our warm-up discussions at ESL Jigsaws. It was easy to segue from that to a virtual shopping trip. To each group of 3-4 students I gave a small stack of holiday flyers and catalogs (Sears, Costco, Williams Food Equipment). I provided them with a graphic organizer on which they could either jot down gift ideas or glue/tape pictures from catalogues. (My Chinese seniors are not very kinesthetic in their learning style; they chose to copy the names of the items.)

For the entire unit plan, my graphic organizer in MS Word, and links, simply go to my website {www.kellymorrissey.com} and then under FREE RESOURCES - Settlement Themes, click the Canadian Culture panel.

Previous year's door decoration

Families Come in All Colours, Shapes and Sizes

Hello!

As you know, I have begun the journey of learning how to make my classroom (and help my agency become) a saf-ER space for newcomers who are members of the LGBTIQ2+ community. During a recent meeting with others engaged in the same process of education and self-assessment, I mentioned that I had created some materials for my literacy learners in which non-traditional families such as those with two moms or two dads were part of the lesson. One person helping to facilitate the workshop I attended expressed interest in having me share these materials and how I use them with other instructors.

Before I would feel comfortable or confident sharing what I've created, I would want to flesh it out A LOT. So I had the idea of creating a series of vignettes of some less traditional family models. So! I need some families living in Canada who would be willing to write a little autobiographical blurb about the members of the family OR tell the story of their family. The subjects are free to focus on the thing that makes their family less traditional or not mention it at all, rather talking about family members' hobbies or the like (or a bit of both).

I would like to offer students of settlement English an illustration to go with each family bio. While I prefer a high resolution, quality colour photo or two, for those families not comfortable with that, we could perhaps produce a line drawing based on a photo or substitute stock photos that resemble the family members.

As for names, I would ideally like to be able to use first names and province, but I am open to publishing some "names have been changed" stories as well. As Erin--one of my consultants on this project--has helped me to see, varying degrees of willingness to out oneself in published photos is in itself a reflection of an aspect of Canadian society that our newcomers can learn about.

If you feel that the kind of family of which you're a part is under-represented or not accurately represented in teaching materials and you would be willing to star in this little book I'm putting together, then it's you I'm looking for.

Aaron and Steph, Childfree by Choice

I am still in the brainstorming / collecting stage, so perhaps the material I receive will dictate the direction in which I take this.

To initiate email correspondence, you can leave a comment on this post or use the flying envelope (contact me) icon at the bottom of the ABOUT ME page.

Thank you so much!

Kelly

This is an LGBTQ+ Positive Space

 Cisgender. Cissexism. Pansexual. Last week I learned a few new words and updated my knowledge of others.

On Tuesday, I sat in one of those nice, cushy board room chairs around a table with a dozen other front-line settlement sector workers to educate myself on the barriers commonly faced by LGBTQ+ newcomers. The all-day workshop was part of the Positive Spaces Initiative, whose website I encourage you to visit if you want to learn more.

When it was my turn, I answered the three questions on the facilitator's Power Point slide: my name, the pronouns I would like used when others refer to me in the third person, and any hopes or fears I had going into the workshop. Gosh golly, I'd never thought about it before. Everyone has always referred to me as "she/her," but not because I'd asked them to. I'd be just as happy in Iranian culture, where everyone has always been "Ou," or in Sweden, where they've just introduced a new pronoun that liberates people from the binary he OR she construct.

Why do you suppose we were each asked to give our preferred pronouns, Erin asked. We sat and blinked at her. It's so that whenever there is someone in the group whose preferred pronoun isn't obvious will not feel singled out in having to request that.  I knew then I was going to like the presentation and presenter.

I've long felt strongly about making my classroom a safe space where I am an enthusiastic ambassador for the Canadian values of tolerance and multi-culturalism, where newcomers of all religions or none can sit side by side to learn the language of respectfully disagreeing.

For the literacy students, it could be a while before they sit in a level three class and learn "I see your point," "in my opinion," and "as I was saying,...." Nevertheless, it's not too early for me to begin to introduce some socio-cultural realities of their new Canadian lives.

In our unit on the family, I stand at the whiteboard with my markers in hand as we brainstorm together the meaning of "family." Inevitably they begin to shout out "mama," "daddy," "children." Sometimes they have enough language before the unit begins to add "grandmother" or other extended family. Because we are only in the warm-up stage, I rely on my artistic ability to convey concepts.

I draw a couple with no children and ask, "What about this? Can this be a family?" They begin to debate, turning toward each other with their conflicting yeses and nos.

"How about this one? Is this a family?" I point to the two fathers with a child.  Next I've sketched two mothers with three kids.

When their YES NO debates have died down and all that remains is the pregnant pause of their curiosity, I do not answer. I stare back at them with an amused smile and let the tension build just two degrees more.

"In Canada," I explain with a sense of pride in being able to welcome them to such a wonderful society, "THIS can be a family. And THIS can be a family. And THIS can also be a family."

If any student seems dubious, I may erase stick figures to make way for Google images. We see wedding cakes topped by two tuxedoed male figures. We see a Gay couple kissing while a priest stands close by. There are flowers. The rice is flying. I search out an image of Kathleen Wynne, premier of our province, flanked by her same-sex partner at a public ceremony.

The point at which any remaining vestige of confusion on faces melts away is when I remind them of the reason most of them feel safe here. Here we can live side by side, Christians and Muslims and all. Many of them have come here fleeing chaos, persecution, violence triggered by intolerance. When I bring this up, they get it. They smile. "Yes," they say. "In Canada, no problem."

To be honest, they usually have only one real concern or question. With their very limited language, they manage to pantomime their most pressing question: how on earth do same-sex couples have babies? Fortunately, I am a very gifted mime. There are many ways, and I present a three-second skit for each. The turkey baster always gets a laugh. And then it's over. Next topic. No big deal.

And that is the classroom atmosphere against which I had my first classroom coming out last year. It went well, but could have gone even better.

And that is why I was so excited when OCASI started the Positive Spaces Initiative, providing me and settlement sector professionals all around Ontario with starter kits and workshops if we would like to start the process of assessing our agencies to determine areas of strength and areas with room for improvement. The goal is for LGBTQ+ newcomers to be able to access services while being afforded the same level of dignity and respect as anyone else--and without having to leave a part of themselves at the door.

A table at the back of the board room was covered in posters, stickers, bookmarks and postcards. At some point in our eight hours together, Erin admonished us to give careful thought to it before putting a rainbow up declaring a space saf(er) and not to do so unless we were ready to commit to creating a space where instances of homophobia and transphobia would not go unchallenged. It would be better to put nothing up than to put up a sign of safety that didn't accurately reflect the way the clients would be received, supported, respectfully treated.

"Maybe your agency isn't ready to embrace LGBTQ+ Positive Space policies and practices, but in your own cubicle you can put up a sticker."

I feel my agency is ready because we did the self-assessment and have begun addressing weak areas while building on and celebrating areas of strength. Three of us were sponsored to attend the workshop. And I'm very happy to say that when I returned to work and explained to colleagues what my workshop had been about, the vast majority asked for a poster in order to declare their classrooms Positive Spaces. I can't wait to see what happens next.