What's on the Walls?

A member of my PLN, Cintia Costa, will be starting a new job this fall as an ESL literacy teacher. She asked me for ideas on decorating her classroom. There isn't enough room on this page for me to share all the ways I can think of for doing this. But I'll start a list of ideas with the hope that some of them will spark Cintia's imagination. Others can add more ideas in the comments.

Although this doesn't get you started on day one, I would say that having the students do the decorating is a wonderful way to make them feel at home and to instantly convey the notion that it is their class, their space. Their work is the focus; their work is valued.

Another thing to consider is whether you want stations, or want a classroom that can easily be reconfigured to accommodate learning stations (a table with iPads, a table with art supplies and paper, a table with letters that can be manipulated, a sand tray to help students with learning disabilities and kinaesthetic learners, a table with flashcards). I am a strong believer in self-paced, self-directed learning and think every school week should include at least one or two hours in which students choose their activity and pace--even if you have to narrow the choices down to only two: Puzzle or iPads? Peer reading circle or illustrating and colouring today's terms?

Each unit you teach will produce something that can be displayed on the walls.

Maria Margaritis incorporated students' colouring pages and stickers in a quiet alcove.

Students love to see their own work displayed on the wall. Everyone benefits from seeing what the other teams came up with. Our walls are a constantly changing gallery of learners' work.

When you succeed in creating a sense of community in your class, the learners will feel empowered to take over many tasks, such as throwing birthday parties for each other.

An alphabet line is invaluable. The many ways we use ours would take up an entire blog post. Try to find one whose illustrations are items that will be familiar and relevant to the learners (x-ray, not xylophone) and not babyish. You might even want learners to cut out their own pictures from magazines to create a custom alphabet line to laminate.

In one corner of my whiteboard, just under the day's date, I write any announcements, such as "Friday: no school." Students learn over time to keep an eye on that part of the board in order not to forget important events and information.

Students in my class also quickly learn that retrieving prior days' worksheets after an absence is their responsibility, not mine. I find that students of both my classes TRULY appreciate this system.

You may want to keep an easel chart at the front of the class for a list of words that you will revisit throughout that week's module.

Students remember the lexis when they have illustrated the new terms. These posters stay on our classroom walls for a week or two and then move to the computer lab for the rest of the school to see.

Some teachers post frequently needed phrases and gambits on a bulletin board, along the wall near the ceiling, or keep them at the ready for certain activities.

Some literacy instructors use word walls. For a while I had one poster for every vowel sound we learned to decode in CVC and vowel team patterns, but I found that over a period of a year or more, this system did not render much bang for our buck.

One thing I can think of that is really important to have on the wall is an exemplar of what the expectation is for a particular task. I put up a copy of the rubric or checklist we'll be using to measure success on a task as well as what success looks like. For example, this is uniform printing. This is not. These sentences each have a capital and period. These do not. And so on. (I seem to have lost the photo of my printing exemplar poster. Sorry!)

Oftentimes our walls are a reflection of what our classroom has become that week. Is it a doctor's office with magazines on a table in the waiting room? A family's dining room during Thanksgiving? A grocery store with aisle signs? A bus stop with schedule posted for weekdays and holidays?

One of the first activities Maria Margaritis did with her Foundations learners was on names of the colours. Their pastel creations soon covered one wall and instantly transformed a sterile little room into a safe and welcoming space.

From musical instruments to construction paper, from live plants to cooking utensils to cameras, the sky is the limit on what your learning space can contain. Cintia, I cannot wait to see what you do with your classroom as you and the learners form relationships and organically co-create the learning space and experience.

Outdoor Classroom Day

For two days I have pushed up sweat-slipped eyeglasses with the back of a soil-dark hand. The back of my neck is sunburned, and muscles are so stiff and sore that I will barely be able to get out of bed tomorrow. But the Early Girl and Roma are in the ground, empty cages waiting above them for vines that will branch and climb. Nasturtiums (shouldn't the plural be Nasturia?) and Marigolds guard the Dinosaur Kale and Rainbow Chard, seedlings all. A three-inch promise of Zucchini sits atop a rich, black mound.

Covered in rosebush scratches, I know that I am alive.

I'm told that May 18th is Outdoor Classroom Day. The educators who thought up this annual event probably had K-12 in mind, but I think outdoor time could be good for adult learners, too. What do you think?

Tomorrow is not May 18th, but the seniors' class and I are hopping on the city bus in order to check out the recently donated open-air Ping-pong table in Windsor's Kiwanis Park. This follows a module on free and low-cost things to do in Windsor and another module during which some students taught the rest of us how table tennis is played.

If I remember to take pictures, we can turn these into a Language Experience Approach (LEA) story afterward. I've never used LEA with any group other than literacy. This will be a good way for us to go materials light and will save the day after teacher spent all her lesson planning time holding a pitchfork. I wonder how seniors will like LEA, whether it will prove to be a valuable tool worth using again.

How about you? With the interminable wet and chilly weather finally abating and the sun smiling down, are you thinking of ways to combine an ESL lesson with a bit of fresh air? I would love to hear.

Teaching Each Other

The seniors spring to life when asked to share their knowledge and expertise. It's sad that in this society we do not more often tap into this amazing resource that is our senior population. They know how to knit, crochet, mend and alter clothing as well as sew their own. They can teach you how to prune the suckers off a tomato plant and how to cast your bait into the school of White Bass when it runs through the Detroit River in springtime. They can teach you to hold a ping-pong paddle and how to tilt your pelvis upward for the first stance of 24-step Tai Chi.

This past two weeks we have been sharing our hobbies with each other. The first week was spent on vocabulary building, skill building, exploring ideas, making posters, and planning the presentations. The second week we had the presentations.

The class broke into three groups and chose to teach: 1) three basic knit stitches 2) the basics of fishing, and 3) how to play ping-pong. Each group created a poster; some made videos; others brought in photos. Their presentations were the best I've seen in three years. Nobody stared down at a script or mumbled unintelligibly. Everyone made eye contact with the audience, spoke slowly and clearly. It was evident that this time they had practiced several times beforehand.

I have to remember to do this more often. It seems that they enjoyed themselves, made progress in the area of fair distribution of work, and actually succeeded in interesting classmates in a new hobby.

The success of these past two weeks leaves me wondering how far we could take this idea. Could we write our memoirs and get them published at the library? Should we learn to create e-books? What about doing something in collaboration with the on-site childminding department? I'm sure the children would be thrilled to get a hand-made toy or book from the seniors.

Do you have ideas for our class? I would love it if you would leave those for me in the comments section below.

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?

Give Them Something to Touch

In ESL literacy instruction, it is so very important to make learning as physical as possible. ESL literacy classes tend to be comprised of at least three kinds of students who direly need learning to be made as hands-on as possible: refugees, whose recent trauma can make focusing on dry lessons impossible; learners with interrupted formal education, as they are unaccustomed to sitting for long periods at a desk; students with learning disabilities, especially ADD/ADHD, who may be desperate for any excuse to get up out of their seats.

I was reminded of this 'best practice' this week as I was passing by the new literacy classroom that is currently blooming in a former childcare space next door to my classroom. Every time I pass by the door, something different draws me into the space. First there was the welcome sign, then the tea kettle with a collection of herbal and black teas, next the little alcove with a carpet that has already been used by our newly arrived Syrians seeking a safe space to pray.

This week's eye candy was a collage of student work covering one wall. Maria had led the learners through a colour lesson involving leaves and fall colours. One thing she noticed about the lesson was that everyone was so calm afterward. Even the men got into carefully colouring around their leaves.

From role plays to realia, anything that allows them to manipulate objects, move, stretch, sing, drum or dance is going to help create an effective and enjoyable language learning experience for this very special clientele.

What's your favourite way of giving your learners a hands-on learning experience?

Make Room for Joy

Have you ever known a teacher who didn't seem to grasp the fine art of selective feedback?  As an instructor of LINC literacy, I feel it is SO VERY IMPORTANT to create a safe space in which we are all free to make mistakes without fearing that anyone is going to chastise or pick, pick, pick on us for every uncrossed T or undotted I, figuratively speaking.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I've spent many hours in the same room with a teacher who could not resist correcting every single imperfection.  I do NOT want to be that teacher.

When a foundations literacy student joins our class, ze is given space to adjust and is granted a silent period. The learner will let me know when ze is ready to be called upon to go to the board. Ze will begin to join in various activities when ze's feeling at home, comfortable and confident. I'm the same sort of second language learner. I understand the need to stand back and watch a while before jumping in.

The conditions under which I teach ESL literacy are not ideal. I wish we could have a separate class for foundations learners, but we don't. Instead, I do my best to differentiate the lesson and offer the foundations learner(s) the support of our teaching assistant--either in class or in another room while the phase I learners are with me in the main classroom. Like I said, it's not ideal.

Currently I have one foundations learner in with eleven Phase I. So I do my best to set expectations for her that are attainable and within her Zone of Proximal Development. This week I hope she can begin to distinguish between small O and small A, both in reading and printing. While others unscramble sentences about our house, she will copy a few.

Well, why am I going on about this? I'm prompted to blog about this today because of something that took place in the classroom yesterday. For three weeks we are building skills toward being able to communicate needs and complaints to the landlord. This week, module three, we are learning the rooms of the house/apartment and what can be found in each room. In teams of two, one team assigned to create each of six rooms in the house, students were snipping pictures out of magazines and taping them to large sheets of construction paper.

One recent newcomer to Canada, a darling young woman who is a Karen refugee, looked to me for approval before pasting into the bedroom a photo of an elegantly dressed woman seated at a grand piano. Without thinking, I made my silly doubting face--the face that says, "Hmmm, think again. Are you sure about that?"

But then I looked down at the collage this student was making with her husband's help. The orange bedroom was overflowing with all the things this young woman might be dreaming that bedrooms in her future life in Canada can hold--plush kingsized beds heaped with brocade pillows, velvet floor-to-ceiling drapes, a Victorian vanity topped by fancy lotions and colognes on a silver tray.

I felt a sharp pang of regret as I saw the delight fade from her sparkling eyes.  How fast and how seamlessly could I backtrack???

YES, Muchi, of course it's okay. If you want a piano in the bedroom, by gosh, put a grand piano in the bedroom!

She laughed. She inferred not only that pianos don't usually go in bedrooms, but also that I was trying hard to save face for her. She laughed some more. (Golly, I love Karen people!) Then I laughed, and soon everyone was laughing.

Whew!

Next time, I'll not be so quick to squash a newcomer's dream of a grand piano in the bedroom.

Learning Through Doing

Although it takes a bit of planning and preparation, I find that lessons built around a real-life activity are a hit with my literacy learners. For our unit on food, we spent a couple of weeks skill building so as to be able to talk to clerks and read signage on an upcoming field trip to Food Basics.

Having purchased (via a team scavenger hunt) the ingredients for the one of the simplest pumpkin pie recipes I could find, this week we focused on the recipe and ended the week before Canadian Thanksgiving by baking a pie at school. Fortunately, we have a kitchen equipped with an oven!

I'm a bit tired of teaching food words right now, so I think we'll take a two-week break from that topic in order to squeeze in our unit on using the library before it gets too chilly to walk there together. Then we'll write a Language Experience Approach book around the photos I took of the students working on our pumpkin pie and will spend a little time each day working toward being able to read it fluently.

If you would like to use any of the worksheets I created to teach this unit, leave a comment and I will clean them up enough to post them in my freebies area.

Do your students enjoy learning through doing?

Why and How I Use Total Physical Response (TPR)

When I was at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock working on my B.A. in the early 1980s, I was invited by one of my profs to travel to Santa Cruz, Bolivia as part of a Partners of the Americas exchange. Dr. Jones was going down there to teach Bolivian ESL instructors how to use Total Physical Response, a language teaching method developed in the early 1970s by James Asher. I was to assist him in facilitating the workshop. Naturally, I first had to learn how to use TPR! This was decades before I would become an ESL teacher, but I was often chosen by the faculty to assist with such projects due to my reputation as a keen polyglot.

There are many good resources on the net for learning about TPR, such as Asher's own site--TPR World. You can find other websites about it and watch tutorials on YouTube.

And I will share a brief summary of the (perhaps unorthodox) version of TPR that Dr. Jones taught me.

Start with some basic classroom commands, such as:

• stand up
• come to the board
• pick up the chalk/marker
• write your name
• put down the chalk/marker
• return to your seat
• sit down

Ideally, you need a model to whom you can initially give each command so that students may copy the action of the model. This is one reason Dr. Jones needed two people for his workshop. If you don't have an assistant or strong student from another class, then you have to use yourself as the one both giving and receiving the commands.

T: "Stand up." [model stands up.]
T: "Sit down." [model sits back down.]
T: [addressing the class] "Stand up."  [Ss stand up.]
T: [addressing the class] "Sit down."  [Ss sit back down.]

Now then, there are two main considerations as I see it:

First of all, you should be careful to build the bank of commands very slowly, only adding a new one when all students are executing the existing ones flawlessly. Easy does it. Confident students enjoy the lesson. Nervous students don't.

Secondly, don't reward guessing. Rather, structure the order of commands so that students must truly listen and understand the utterances. To achieve this aim, you have to keep the learners on their toes. Make the order of commands unpredictable both by mixing them up AND by throwing in some random crazy commands, such as:

• jump up and down
• turn around
• touch your nose

If I'm using TPR with my literacy learners to teach some new vocabulary, it may go something like this:

Mahmed, give the eraser to Fatima. Fatima, give the eraser back to Mahmed. Mahmed, put the eraser on your head. Give the eraser to Susan. Susan, put the eraser under your book. Thank you. Pick up the pencil. Give the pencil to Sarah. Give the eraser to Mahmed. Sarah, touch your nose. Please stand up. Jump up and down. Give the pencil to Juan. Sit down. Thank you. Juan, ...

And so on.

It's a LOT of fun, and takes the pressure off the students to speak. I use it when introducing new concrete vocabulary, such as clothing, school supplies, money, etc., and when we have a new student who is starting from zero, unable even to answer the simplest of questions or spell her name. After ten minutes of TPR, the new student is participating just as successfully as higher level students around her, which helps her relax and gives her a boost of confidence. I agree with Asher's assertion that language-body conversations are a 'stress-free tool.'

So the short answer to why I use TPR is because I know of it. Because I was in the right place at the right time 30 years ago, I have an extra tool in my TESL tool box. I have continued to use it because it is a great way to get up and running with very low level literacy learners who are starting from scratch, and--best of all--because the learners enjoy it.

Beyond the scope of this little blog post are the phases of TPR in which learners begin to speak and write. You can research those on your own if you're interested.

I hope like this little peek into my use of TPR in the ESL and ESL Literacy classrooms and will leave a comment so I'll know you were here.

How to Make a Classroom Bank Machine

The wisest thing I've ever done to help my literacy learners become comfortable with an ATM--something they had indicated via our needs assessment was important to them--was build an ATM from a cardboard box. Fortunately for me, all our students use the same bank, making the resource hunting part of this unit easier for me.

To give students lots of scaffolding for this lesson, we spent a week working with Fatima Goes to the Bank and the following week building our skills with the vocabulary needed for just ONE type of transaction--a withdrawal. These are words such as savings, chequing, select, and receipt. You'd be surprised how manageable these screens can be if you help students learn to scan for the words they DO KNOW while ignoring the big ones they don't know. For example, out of "no more transactions," they can find and understand "no more."

After learning how to withdraw and getting lots of practice with the simulated screens in class, the learners requested that we repeat the entire process with the deposit transaction. So that took another week. We combined it with learning to write cheques. After writing each other $20 cheques, those cheques were what we put into our deposit envelopes.

I found this unit on using an ATM to be very successful. Students learned that they needn't be intimidated by all those options on the screen as long as they can scan and find the option they need. By working with TD Bank's online Green Machine tutorials* and the classroom ATM that had been modelled after those screens, students got to the point of knowing exactly which question was coming next. Not only that, but learners had a lot of fun taking turns standing behind the cardboard ATM to flip the screens and push the bank card, receipt and money out through the proper slots while the student customer stood facing the "machine," ready to receive each one in turn.

Of course we also talked about ATM safety points, such as protecting your PIN, not counting money until you're in a private and safe place, where and when NOT to use an ATM, and other safety concepts.

Finally, we took photos of ourselves using the classroom ATM and built a story book around the process. That was our reading material for the following week, providing lots of recycling of the same words and concepts.

What you will need for a classroom ATM:

• a cardboard box from your local liquor or grocery store
• a utility or exacto knife
• card stock on which to draw the keypad (or my photo of it printed out in colour)
• packing or duct tape
• ruler
• markers
• a life-sized print-out of a bank card to paste below the card slot (direction must match ATM)
• one presentation portfolio or lightweight binder with enough plastic sleeves to hold all your screens
• one copy of my editable ATM screens (Literacy - Banking and Money)
• classroom money (at least four twenties)

Steps:

1. Insert 8.5 x 11" screens for a given transaction into the plastic sleeves in the same order in which they appear on the Green Machine.
2. Use strong tape to affix one cover of the binder to the top of the box in such a way that the plastic sleeves hang down onto the face of the ATM and can be flipped back out of the way one at a time.
3. Use a ruler to sketch out then a knife to cut four slots: one for the bank card, another for the receipt to come out, a slot for deposits, and a large bottom slot from which the money can emerge. (Study a real TD Bank ATM so you know where these slots really are.)
4. Paste the picture of the keypad or draw a PIN pad on a separate piece of cardboard and place it in front of the machine or attach it like a fold-out flap.

Voila! You have a classroom bank machine.

Also very helpful in teaching ATM use at any level are TD Canada Trust's own screen-by-screen tutorials and GCF LearnFree.org's ATM, an interactive simulator. Or check out this Canadian ATM simulator.

Please do let me know if you end up using any of these ideas. I would be so happy to know it.

Our Milagro Tree

Do you decorate your classroom door or a bulletin board for the holidays? For a few years running, the organization for which I work held a door decorating contest. Now I'll admit to being just a weeeeee bit competitive. I wanted our project to win. Well, it didn't win, but the experience left an impression on me so lasting that I want to share it now, two years later.

I will admit that were I to do this again, I would bring the learners on board earlier and facilitate a more collaborative and democratic process from the very start, including the decision making process re how to decorate the door. But sometimes I am little miss instant gratification. Must do it NOW. The Friday night I decided to do this was one of those impulsive moments.

After much browsing through Google images using every keyword combination I could think of to render pictures of award-worthy decorations on classroom doors, I gave up. Later the same night, while drooling over yummy material possessions I neither need nor will ever actually purchase, I found this image.

That Monday morning I arrived at school with $3 worth of wooden dowels, a roll of aluminum foil, some red tissue paper, a sheet of silver bristol board, a package of 50 ornament hangers, and several pieces of thick cardboard dug out of my recycling bin.

The LINC 2/3 students who had been left in my care while their instructor attended a wedding on another continent joined me in cutting out symbols of peace and of our respective religions. With crinkled up red paper as a backdrop, we wrapped the "bones" of the tree and each little ornament in tin foil.

I wish I could share photos of the students of different faiths working together on our Milagro Tree.

The Power of Realia

I can remember starting a collection of realia before I'd landed my first teaching job. No longer did my junk mail go into the recycling bin. Solicitations from credit card firms, flyers from rent-to-own companies with their usurious interest rates, forms in clinic waiting rooms--they all went into my "might need that someday" realia file. I'm sure glad we have ample cabinets at work since my big bag of flattened food wrappers and containers takes up quite a bit of space.

In ESL literacy, I continually ask myself how I can incorporate realia into the week's lessons. If we're doing a unit on shopping, you'll find me running around town collecting grocery store flyers, discarded receipts, and bags.

Though paper and plastic classroom money comes in handy, during our unit on money, I passed out ziplock baggies with actual coins in them. While studying shopping, learners found and circled the HST and totals on real store receipts. When we studied food and used Eye On Literacy's set of wordless picture books called "Pancakes," I brought in measuring spoons, flour, oil, sugar, baking soda and powder, a measuring cup, eggs, and buttermilk. We made pancakes.

Today in my multi-level seniors' class, realia truly brought the lesson to life. The students have unanimously voted to return to the topic of health/medical and talking to medical professionals. They want to dig in deeper, this time learning how to communicate with specialists, with technicians during a variety of diagnostic tests, etc. So today we extended a lesson about diabetes using an actual Ontario lab requisition form. When I asked a coworker in another department if she could spare a few cotton balls to make our role plays more realistic, she not only came up with those, but also offered band-aids and gloves. One student turned a retractable pen into a convincing syringe.

Do you use a lot of realia in your teaching? What is your favourite lesson involving a lot of realia? Do you feel a lesson that incorporates realia is more effective?