On the Horizon

Back in early spring I was feeling the burgeoning potential of the greening world around me. I was in a new relationship and feeling excited. I had an idea for a new project, too--something bigger than I've taken on before.

The relationship has ended, I'm sorry to say, but one of the benefits of dating a compulsive analyzer and sensitive communicator is that now I'm participating in a very helpful post-mortem.

The project, I'm happy to say, has not shrivelled on the vine. Rather, it just this morning entered a phase more concrete than conceptualization. My project partner met with me under the maple boughs on my lower deck landing overlooking a small tributary to the Detroit River. The person who graced my humble abode with her presence is a bit of a legend in these parts, and I'm still feeling high from her visit.

Also of interest to us all is a new book coming from Steve Smith and Gianfranco Conti on teaching listening. This blog post is a small teaser.

What is on your horizon this week?

New Activity Pack - Jiadeep's Big Fall

I have just published my latest activity pack to accompany an ESL literacy reader from Bow Valley College - School of Global Access.

Before using this reader with my phase one adequate and phase two beginning literacy students, I use the emergency services materials from Toronto Police newcomer outreach program and also the "Calling 911" materials from the free e-book HandsOn!, each one for a week.** For this reason, I did not include fire, or police car in the new lexicon of twelve terms. Those three words are being recycled but are not novel at this point.

My new activity pack has:

• label new vocabulary
• gap-fill
• text flash cards
• picture flash cards
• word unscramble
• dialogue to practice for calling 911
• true/false quiz
• make the false sentences true
• sentence unscramble
• bingo game

Also available for download under LITERACY - EMERGENCY SERVICES is a word search puzzle. Enjoy!

**Teachers of higher levels can use the Toronto Police materials, as they go through CLB 5 and culminate in the viewing of a clip from the movie Crash along with an actual form for filing a complaint with the police.

Fun with Graphics

There is not much I enjoy more on a chilly, overcast day than to cuddle up in my corner by the window with my graphic tablet. I can watch the Baltimore Orioles stick their bills down into blobs of grape jelly, sip nectar, and pick the pulp out of orange halves while I work.

As someone who loves to illustrate learning materials, I think two of the best purchases I ever made were: enrolment in Tony Vincent's online course, Classy Graphics, and my Wacom Intuos Draw graphic tablet, which came with the free version of ArtRage software. I ended up upgrading to the premium version, but only for one feature that most people will not need.

Tony taught me how to create things in Google Draw. I have forsaken word processing platforms and usually use Google Draw to make worksheets like this one.

I can also use it to make board games.

Tony also taught me how to build any icon or illustration I need just using the SHAPES feature of Google Draw. The car in the picture below consists of about nine different shapes. This is a great ability to have when you just cannot find that perfect royalty-free image to illustrate a concept.

Google Draw is also handy when I need props for role plays such as bank cards, the screens of the self-check machine at the library, and even an auto insurance card or speeding ticket.

But Google Draw has its limitations. For some jobs, I turn to the graphic tablet. For my mock Ontario driver's license, I first had to trace over a photo of a trillium. From that I made a tiny trillium watermark. Tony showed me how to replicate one very small image to create a background pattern on a page. Then I brought in my traced trillium and used the transparency tool to turn it into a big watermark. I enjoy all these fussy little steps!

The graphic tablet also comes in really handy for things like adding the face to this driver's license.  You CAN use Google Draw to make a face, but I find that for $99 CAD, the tablet was well worth it for all the fun I have with it. Oh, and Tony also taught me how to use a colour picker tool to find out the exact shade of green I had already chosen for the licence so I could repeat a shade of it behind the man's face.

Here is something I did entirely with the graphic tablet. I took a photo of my students sitting on chairs that we were using as an imaginary bus stop. In ArtRage I was able to trace the photo, colour it, then bring in a photo of a park bench, size it, and trace that so that it seemed to be under the men all along. 

If you've read this far, you deserve the reward. I've just uploaded the Andres' Speeding Ticket activity pack to my website under LITERACY - Emergency Services. It made sense to me to put it there instead of creating a section about the law for literacy learners. Stay tuned for more. I usually end up fixing a typo or two and adding a couple of puzzles when I use the pack in my own class.

How about you? Do you have the type of personality that is good for slow, methodical, fussy work like sewing? Or not so much?

Spring Fever

The tulips in my yard are opening, the peonies are just starting to unfurl their shiny new leaves, and the grape hyacinth is in bloom along my driveway. My boyfriend loves seeking out the ephemeral wildflowers in the woods this time of year. I am a birder who enjoys catching the migrating warblers as they pass through as well as ticking off new species on my fern and wildflower checklists. Today he got Trout Lily, Red Trillium, White Trillium, and Spring Beauty while I craned my neck at the budding canopy where Yellow-rumped, Black-throated Green, Black-throated Blue, and other warblers foraged.

photo by Grant Segall

At school, there is something in the air. Teachers can be overheard counting the weeks until summer break. In the hallways, I have seen more than one huddle around a crying student. Is it the sudden crunch of assessments and knowledge that there's only so much time left to make the grade?

With each April, the world is made to feel new again. After nine years in the same job--four years longer than I've ever stayed with the same organization or position--I'm struggling to find ways to make it feel fresh. I'm very fortunate that half my teaching day is spent with seniors; they are always open to adventure. To keep things from feeling stale, I rely on a steady stream of topics that are intriguing not only to the students but also to me. Each comes with the possibility of a guest speaker or field trip.

Last week the seniors and I hopped on a city bus and visited our local hospice for a tour. And no, my school does not receive any funds for field trips. We were able to go because every single student owns a bus pass. I paid my $6 round-trip fare from my pocket.

At the bus terminal

Another thing I do to make old topics feel novel, aside from leading field trips and hosting guest speakers, is to expand on or enhance previously used materials. This week, for example, I jazzed up a module on Vitamin D and calcium with a trivia game for the traditionally lighter fifth day of the school week. If you are using a lesson pack on calcium and vitamin D from the OPH-OCDSB Collaborative Team via Tutela.ca, you are welcome to download my trivia game cards from https://www.kellymorrissey.com/health-and-medical.html.

Literacy class is even more prone to feeling repetitive. In the back corner of the room stands the same grey file cabinet I've had for nine years. The second drawer holds all my literacy materials: master copies of handouts, picture flashcards, and all those matching games that took hours of early morning time to cut out and paper clip together for up to five pairs of students. So, as with seniors class, to keep myself from going mad, I find ways to make each iteration of the same module a bit different.

This past week the afternoon students were learning about minimum wage with the Laws About Pay materials from Community Legal Education Ontario (CLEO). I'm happy to say that all but one of my students will be moving to the mainstream CLB 1 class in September, as they can now handle level one work such as this booklet from CLEO. This time around, I added a listening activity that brought in both numeracy and map skills by quickly grabbing a copyright-free colouring page from the internet.

First I led them through colouring the water so that it was easier to see where land ended and water began. We talked about the wiggly lines (coast) versus the straight lines (international border). Since Windsor is a border town, they easily got the idea that the straight line along the "bottom" of Canada is the U.S.A. After colouring the provinces and territories, which I hope will strengthen their growing ability to identify provinces and territories, I turned the map into a worksheet for a listening quiz. With a list of Canada's minimum wage amounts in front of me, I first had a strong student come to the board and write in the dollar amount as I dictated "Alberta's minimum wage is $15 an hour." He got it right. I then called on the second strongest student to write in an amount on another province. After three more demonstrations, I had everyone copy these five amounts onto their maps. I then dictated the last eight dollar amounts to the whole class as each student listened and pencilled in the remaining dollar amounts on their maps.

How about you? Do you have spring fever? Have you been teaching the same level for some time? How do you make the old feel new again?

Cool Hand Luke

This week I have a little of this and a little of that for discussion.

First I want to share Yuliya's update on the state of PBLA research. Here is her recent missive.

Dear Colleagues,

Here is a very brief update on our PBLA implementation research and a new project invitation for literacy teachers, from a colleague at theUniversity of Birmingham.

I continue to present on the project that you participated in order to stimulate further discussion, more research, and, ultimately, policy changes.
Three major conferences are approaching: Metropolis National Conference in Halifax, BC TEAL, and ACLA/CAAL 2019 in Vancouver. Hoping to see you there if you are close to any of the conference sites.

Good news is that other research projects on PBLA are underway, and both are researching PBLA impact on beginner language learners: Dr. Marylin Abbot is working with learners of refugee background in Edmonton, and Esther Karasova is inviting literacy teachers to share their experiences with PBLA implementation at pre-CLB and lowest CLB levels.

If you could share the invitation below with your colleagues, it would be very much appreciated. Insightful and practice-relevant research can not be conducted without teachers' input. Esther’s survey is short, focused, and can be completed in about 10 minutes.
Thank you for your consideration!


Best regards,

Yuliya

Secondly, I'm happy to announce to literacy and low-level ESL teachers that I've just published a new ESL literacy reader with activity pack. It's aimed at about a high CLB 1L to 2L or a CLB 1 class and is called The Library. You can download the PDFs of the book and activity pack from www.kellymorrissey.com - LITERACY - School and Library OR you can click either the book image or the activity pack image on that site to go directly into the Google file in order to edit it before use. The book itself is not city-specific, but the activity pack does have Windsor street names and our late fines. So the activity pack would need to be edited before use by teachers in other cities. Please email me if you find a typo or have any feedback.

Lastly, I would like to address myself to those commenters whose comments have not made it past the new screening process in the past week or two--not that any of you would be back here to read another blog post! The rule as is stands, having been put to a vote by readers, is that the anonymous commenting feature is intended to be used only by those whose comments could get them fired or blacklisted. If you want to take potshots at the PBLA skeptics and critics, use your name. If you want to call us whiners and wallowers in negativity, do so under your own name. If you want to make the point that the issuing of new PBLA guidelines means we now have no excuse not to all jump back on the bandwagon, shut our traps and just put the damned pieces of paper in the binders, you may say that; just sign your real name.

I think that is where a lot of debate is going to centre now. What do the new guidelines mean for everyone? For some, it could mean an end to a lot of bullying and power grabbing by supervisors who had been using their twisted version of PBLA to make teachers' lives a living hell. That's yet to be seen. But for some of us, the new guidelines do little to change our stance. I don't have Claudie's gift for spelling things out; I'm fond of metaphors and allegories.

My PBLA lead teacher, after a round of inspecting binders in anticipation of a visit by an IRCC binder auditor, said to me: "I don't know why you have such issues with PBLA. You know how to do it. You're doing it fine." She said something to that effect. I responded, "Just because I can follow some steps doesn't mean I think it's in the best interest of stakeholders. You could set up a ladder and ask me to climb to the top and back down 17 times. I could execute that perfectly. It wouldn't mean I agreed with having to do it."

Suddenly a scene from an old movie came to mind.

New Activity Pack, Revived Newsletter

Last week I said I was only going to blog every other week, yet here it is a week later and I'm blogging. Go figure.

Over the weekend I got my graphic tablet and ArtRage software up and running again with the new laptop. Did you know that I completely BLISS OUT when I am sketching on my Wacom Intuos Draw? I do. And it was the perfect weekend to stay inside and create materials. When I stepped out just to the store for soup ingredients, I instantly regretted it. Once I had the soup stuff, I was content to sit by the window and work on the Andres Needs Gas activity pack.

I'm not planning to make worksheets in MS Word anymore. I've noticed that older activity packs in Word do not maintain their formatting well when opened in subsequent versions of Word. Also, there can be an issue with fonts, particularly KG Primary Penmanship font, required for penmanship lines. A document created in Google Drawing, on the other hand, is very easy to set up and save as a PDF. Every once in a while, I'll get a request from a teacher somewhere out there in the world who wants me to open the Google doc for editing. In that case, I just point out that it's not necessary for me to share editing privileges with them. Anyone can go to FILE - Make a Copy. I learned all of this from Tony Vincent.

How many of you are enrolled now in Tony's spring course, Classy Graphics? I still use what he taught me weekly if not daily.

Not only am I having second thoughts about limiting my blogging to biweekly, I'm also thinking I may continue the newsletter. When I sent out a farewell edition, I got feedback encouraging me to continue. It doesn't take much for me to reconsider. A little positive feedback goes a long way.

With that said, here is what I worked on this weekend. You will notice I am not as stuck in perfectionist mode as before. Once upon a time, I felt that all images had to be in the same style. I would never mix clip art with photos with my own sketches. This time I did. I don't like it, but I'm going to live with it this once because a) I needed the activity pack this week and couldn't wait for perfectionist Kelly to spend an hour on every sketch; b) do the uncomfortable until it feels comfortable.

You can download the Andres Needs Gas reader from Bow Valley College School of Global Access website. You can grab my activity pack from www.kellymorrissey.com - Literacy - Transportation. I also linked to it under Literacy - Community because Andres visits many places around town: the library, bank, grocery store, etc. In fact I think I will follow this reader with my "Around Town" unit.

If you know someone who would like to receive the monthly round up and reminders of free resources created that month, point them to the SUBSCRIBE link in the sidebar. ---->

I guess I'm getting a second wind!

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?

The Sky is the Limit with Google Drawing

Ever since I made the astoundingly wise decision to join Tony Vincent's online course "Classy Graphics with Google Drawing," I have all but abandoned the Microsoft Office suite for creation of classroom materials. Learning how to use Google Draw also opened the door for me to investigate Google Docs, Google Forms, and Google Slides. I love the fact that I no longer need to worry about saving work done at home to a flash drive that I carry to work since everything I create in the Google suite is saved in the cloud. Sorry if the way I talk about this magic gives me away as someone who did not grow up with the terminology. Is that even how digital natives say it? Saved in the cloud? Whatever! I am happy to be a digital transplant, non-native accent be damned.

A couple of weeks ago, I was standing at the copy machine, my hands outstretched as I eagerly collected a print job before heading off to class. "I made that," I bragged to a colleague who was next in the queue for the copier. She indicated that she would like for me to show her how to do it.  You don't have to ask me twice to show you how to do something; teaching is my passion.

And so about a week later I had six or seven colleagues from three different departments gathered in our computer lab after hours to get the quick and dirty introduction to Google Drawing. Since I cannot possibly teach all the concepts and applications of this great tool in an hour (nor do the sort of job Tony does in breaking it down and making it fun), I passed out flyers inviting those who wished to go further to Tony's only offering of Classy Graphics to take place in 2018. The deadline for joining is April 9th, 2018. Although the first class was this past Tuesday, that is not a big deal since all instruction is recorded and posted for viewing at each student's leisure. A lot of peer support takes place via Flipgrid among fellow educators located around the world. Homework assignments are always optional. It is very cool.

Anyway, everyone was pretty excited to receive an introduction to the platform. In just an hour of playing around, these coworkers of mine were already starting to get the hang of the various tools.

I had pinned to a bulletin board in the class a sampling of worksheets, graphic organizers, and posters I've made using Google Drawing as well as some magazine advertisements that could easily be reproduced using nothing but Google Drawing and an attractive photo. We analyzed how some of these were created.

I continue to be fascinated by graphic design and constantly view every bit of visual marketing in my environment with the question, "How did they do that? Could I do that?" With the exception of text that curves around a circle or semi-circle, I find there is just about nothing I cannot reproduce.

While flipping through a free magazine picked up this morning at a health food store, I spotted a lovely layout that I wanted to try to replicate just for the fun of it...just to see if I could. Here is my mock-up.

This took me about 20 minutes, including obsessively searching for the perfect fonts and similar photo of a rosemary plant. Not bad for free software, eh?

The thing I like most about Google docs, slides and drawings compared with Microsoft Word is that elements stay where I put them. With Word, I find myself very often frustrated and wasting time fighting the software to get it to do exactly what I want it to do and then not mess up what I had arranged when I go to add something else to the mix. The columns of words in my word bank below the bingo grid need to stay put and not bleed over onto the next page every time I sneeze. Why must I turn on REVEAL CODES to find out where the 3-column formatting ends? I should not have to first insert a table before using images just to ensure images will not get a life of their own and fly away to another part of the page when my back is turned. It's not like I don't know my way around the FORMAT IMAGE menus. I've been enrolling in MS Office suite workshops since the late 1990s. When I tick "different first page" in Headers and Footers, it should be intuitive and not make me guess whether the first page or every page thereafter is now going to keep the header I just created. Things like that drive me batty. Teaching is hard enough without having to duke it out with materials creation tools. These are some of the reasons I am abandoning Microsoft and embracing the Google suite of tools.

What's Up at Joy of ESL?

There is a lot going on right now for me as a language instructor, perpetual student, blogger, webmaster, and creator / illustrator of learning materials! Since everything I'm doing right now leaves no time for a separate blog post, I thought I would simply write about what I'm up to. Would you like a peek under the hood?

The thing that gives me most pleasure is illustrating. When I first started making activity packs to complement literacy readers, I did not know how to easily create illustrations. My earliest attempts were simple black line drawings done in the free Paint application that came pre-loaded on my computer. I drew a scarf, hat, and boots using my finger on my laptop's trackpad.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I am using Google Drawing to create images such as this medical form and health card. I can't say enough good things about the online "Classy Graphics" course I took in Google Classroom with Tony Vincent. Without that class, I would not know how to use Google Drawing at all. Anyway, the image of a blank piece of paper on a clipboard was free for the taking on Pixabay.com. I send them a donation after every 20 or 30 images that I use.  I also found the caduceus on Pixabay and simply shrank it down to fit in the upper left corner of the piece of paper. The rest of the form was created using text boxes in Google Drawing.

The image of a health card was created almost entirely in Google Drawing. I imported only Maria's face, which I drew using a Wacom Intuos Draw graphic tablet and Artrage software in trace mode over a photo from the reader.

The walk-in clinic image started with a photo of an actual clinic in downtown Windsor that I believe my students are familiar with. I traced the sidewalk and greenery, made the canvas transparent, exported that as a PNG file, and imported it into Google Drawing in order to create the building, doors, and signs using shapes and text boxes.

For some images, I don't open Google Drawing at all, but just use the graphic tablet, such as was the case with this depiction of the nurse who calls Maria in from the waiting room. When I was originally given permission to create activity packs for the Bow Valley College readers, I was told I could not use their images. Yet one cannot follow best practices for the creation of materials and worksheets for literacy learners without images! So hopefully the number of images I replicate with modification falls within the scope of what in Canada we call 'fair dealing'.

So! Literacy teachers can look forward to my publishing this new activity pack before too long. It is my hope that you will notice the quality of my materials improving over time.

My own literacy learners are reaching the end of their five-month term with me. Many will be moving on to a mainstream CLB 1 or 1/2 class at the end of this month. I'm so proud that they can now tackle this level of reader and are asking for more challenging material all the time.

Second on my plate right now, aside from teaching itself, is keeping up with the research and latest developments in our ongoing effort to get the powers that be to listen to us, believe us, and respect us when we attempt to inform them of things that are wrong with (or are going wrong with the roll-out of) Portfolio Based Language Assessment experiment. Many problems are inherent, other problems are the result of certain employers' interpretation of the 'non-negotiables.' Either way, we still have a dire need for open, honest, mutually respectful and fruitful communication between front-line workers and the big fish at the top of the food chain. Since I was losing track of all the links, I decided to dedicate a page of my website to the curation of these resources, links to research, and so on. It is HERE. If you have suggestions for better wording or other links, you can comment below, email me, or message me on Twitter.

Thirdly and lastly, I am SO JAZZED that Tony Vincent, the one who taught me how to use Google Drawing, is offering a new course called Classy Videos in February. It's not too late to sign up. It's six weeks, but you do NOT have to be at your computer at a given time on a given day. You always have a week to watch the video and do the (optional) assignment.

All of this has me excited about the new year. How about you? Are you excited?

FREEBIE! Winter Break Wordless Picture Book

It's nice to have the webinar behind me. I can go back to what I enjoy most: illustrating and making learning materials! I spent today revamping a little 8-page wordless book about winter break that prints two-sided and folds in the middle for stapling. The whole book requires just 2 sheets of 8.5 by 11" paper. It uses only a tiny bit of colour ink and also prints well in grey scale. Some images were intentionally left as line drawings so that students may add the colour if they see fit. I keep a box of coloured pencils in my cabinet for those days when we just need a short break from the cognitive heavy lifting.  Colouring is also therapeutic for those experiencing PTSD. Margaret Margaritis and I have both observed students having better focus and lower affective filter during and after about 20 minutes of colouring.


As for the webinar, I suppose it went pretty well, but I have since thought of several things I'll do differently if we are invited to repeat somewhere. For one, I think we should have been more explicit in our directions. Teachers were to look at the graphic organizers and come up with specific ideas for how the initial collection activity could be a springboard to further study of one of the parts of speech. I've created a space on my Flipgrid where anyone curious about Back-to-the-Well or anyone who already believes in slowing down, turning fewer pages, and engaging learners more deeply can drop in with questions or ideas. Hey, if nothing else, just stop in to see how Flipgrid works! It's SO easy that even my seniors AND literacy learners can use it. There's nothing to register for, no email address required. Come on, you know you wanna. ;)

Google Slides for Quick and Dirty Desktop Publishing

I am so OVER using a word processor to quickly create newsletters, Language Experience Approach (LEA) books with literacy students, and multi-page worksheets for my classes. Thanks to Tony Vincent and his Classy Graphics course that I took over the summer, I now turn to Google Drawing for one-page worksheets, handouts or posters. Google Slides can be used in the exact same way when you need a document to have several pages.

To use Google Slides to create a series of worksheets or a booklet, you simply change the page settings to 8.5" x 11" or to whatever your page dimensions need to be. One reason I love using these tools in the Google suite of tools is that I no longer find myself searching through a bunch of (not very intuitive) menus to find the setting I'm looking for. I'm tired of fighting with Word over headers and footers that need to start after the cover and inside front cover, or which need to be different section to section. I'm a smart person who has taken MANY classes, and after twenty years, the software should NOT still be giving me headaches. The interface in the suite of Google tools is easy to learn to use. It's more intuitive than a word processor and makes editing or making small and large changes to layout a breeze.

A few features that I enjoy in Google Slides and Google Drawing include the following:

• Images stay where I put them. I can easily resize using handles.
• Double clicking an image allows me to CROP IT IN PLACE! (Be still, my heart.)
• Columns of text stay where I put them, do not run onto the next page when my back is turned!
• I don't find myself needing to turn on REVEAL CODES to see why my document's content is 'acting up.'
• All my creations reside on my Google Drive, available to me from any computer hooked to the internet. No more carrying around a flash drive!
• I can easily share with my colleagues and with you.
• By embedding the document in my website, any improvements I make to the original on my Google Drive automatically feed through to the one on my website!!! (This is so time-saving since I am a tweaker.)

This week I used Google Slides to create a variety of activities to enrich an upcoming field trip to Jackson Park / Queen Elizabeth II Gardens that my multilevel seniors class has requested. 

If you teach LINC in Windsor's downtown core (or just want to see a booklet that was created in Google Slides), you can download this activity pack for use with your own class. With Bloom's Taxonomy in mind, I provided at least one activity for each level of this pedagogical hierarchy. This week I will show my students the choices and allow each student to choose the task with which he/she feels most comfortable and which promises to boost his/her engagement and challenge language use the most. All of this ties into the theme of Canada and Canadian history, which got a large number of votes during our recent needs assessment.

How do you use Google Docs, Sites, Drive, Drawing, Slides and other tools in the suite with your classes? If you don't yet, are you tempted to try?

ESL Literacy Clients Deserve Better

Canadian ESL literacy instruction represents a tiny and often overlooked corner of the world of teaching English as a second or additional language. If you serve these clients, you know how difficult it can be to find appropriate resources and classroom materials of the same quality as what our colleagues teaching mainstream settlement English have at their fingertips.

When I was hired for the literacy class that I now teach, the materials I was expected to teach from consisted of a binder a colleague had put together on her own initiative. Had it not been for that, I would have had nothing but one shelf in a cabinet full of dusty, yellowed, outdated materials that fell far short of meeting what we know today as best practices for working with pre-literate and semi-literate ESL learners.

Slowly, by mining the internet every evening and weekend for many months, I began to curate a decent collection of resources on my computer. I found HandsOn!, Making it Real, and the treasure trove of materials and instructor handbooks at Bow Valley College Centre for Excellence in Immigrant and Intercultural Advancement.

But it wasn't enough.

I began creating my own activity packs to complement the wonderful Bow Valley College readers. I went shopping online, and my employer purchased some of the Talk of the Block sets, a few resources from Grassroots Press, and a few more books each fall at the publishers' expo at the TESL Ontario conference.

Yet even when I was turned loose in Toronto with a couple hundred bucks in my pocket and permission from my employer to beef up the ESL literacy section of our resource library, there wasn't much for me to buy. There still isn't. When I visit my local teacher supply store in hopes of finding an alphabet line for my classroom, I come away having settled for something that was designed with NS children in mind.  I don't want the S word to be star, which begins with a blend. I want a pure S followed by vowel sound. I don't want any of the images to be words my newcomers will not need in their vocabularies for another ten years; I want words that are relevant to their lives now. O is for octopus? How about O is for on / off with a picture of a light switch? Now that's English we can put to use immediately!

On my last post, Cintia Costa left a profound comment. Central to her teaching philosophy is Love. Yeah, big L Love. I also believe deeply in the value of Love. So much flows from Love: respect, growth, trust, community, a safe space.

Love, if you ask me, is in the details.

How can we claim to respect our ESL literacy clients if we do not pay attention to the details? I, for one, am not satisfied putting materials in front of them that are not designed for them. Would you use a magazine containing violent war pictures with a group of refugees just arrived from war-torn areas? Of course not. You would pre-screen what you use and would set aside the resources not appropriate for them. You respect them. You care about the experience they have in your classroom.

So why are we okay with an alphabet line that was made for little Canadian children? To be honest, it's probably because we have no choice. Materials designed for pre-literate and semi-literate ADULT newcomers to Canada are very hard to find. It's a tiny niche market, so what publishing company is going to bother developing these things?

The good news is that it's becoming easier all the time for you and me to stop waiting around for someone else to make these resources. I'm ready to make them myself. A is for apple, B is for baby, C is for a cup of coffee. D is not for dog, but might be for door or doctor.

I'll let you know when the set is ready for free download. ;)

How about you? Do you think we teachers of ESL literacy have to take it upon ourselves to create what we need?

Rats!

It seems I forgot to write a blog post this past Sunday. I remembered on Monday and meant to come do it. Oops! I remembered again on Tuesday and intended to come write. Oops! Here it is FRIDAY.

I will try to make up for that with some added value this weekend.

In the meantime I have been deeply immersed in both professional and leisure activities, as well as healing from major surgery.

I have been:

• Working on a Back to the Well 2.0 webinar with John Sivell.
• Completing my week five assignment as part of Tony Vincent's Classy Graphics with Google Drawing course (see poster below).
• Patronizing the Windsor-Walkerville Fringe Festival
• Taking good care of my container garden on the deck and the veggie plot out front.
• Harvesting purslane and kale for healthy smoothies.
• Reading fiction, a delicious indulgence for which I never seem to find time September to June.
• Getting ready for a houseguest next week and the return of my mom a couple weeks later.

Here is the poster I created for my week five assignment to create an infographic or a cheat sheet of some sort. I'm not sure this poster for my classroom wall really meets that definition, but it was something I needed in the real world, so I used that need to motivate myself.

To help you understand the backstory: I voluntarily run a hospitality station in one corner of my classroom that is open to all 200+ students in our school. I give everyone access to my room only before 9:00, during the two official breaks--one morning and one afternoon--and sometimes during the one-hour lunch break if I am around. But it can be challenging conveying to newcomers with limited English what my expectations are for the coffee and tea station. It is also hard to get the message across that my employer does not subsidize the cost of the coffee, tea, creamer, sweetener, sugar or the $250 I shelled out for the purchase of the huge water boiler. Another concept that can be hard to communicate is that disposable cups are not earth-friendly, so use the same thrift shop sourced mug daily, keep it clean, and don't grab a cup that has another person's name on the bottom.

Tony challenged us to imagine we were being charged $100 for every word used. He stressed that a picture is worth 1000 words. And I decided to include a photo of my face on the poster after having heard of this study. This is what I came up with. 

What are you doing this summer?

More Classy Graphics

I can't blog about anything else because I can't think about anything else right now.

My mom is an artist. It was a single-parent household, and we didn't have a lot. But there were always art supplies. Mom was thrilled if either my brother or I showed any interest in her latest medium of choice. I learned how to make linoleum block prints, carving away from the body so as not to gouge myself. I learned to cut coloured glass and silk screen a tee shirt, and draw with hot wax on silk fabric that would later be dyed for a Batik design.  Mom showed me how to throw and fire a clay pot. She tried to teach me to paint, but that was an utter failure. I ran crying from the studio at the first mistake. Miss instant gratification, miss perfectionist. I didn't have the patience to try and try again.

Mom envied me my drawing ability. She would come to me and ask me to sketch the dove for that year's embossed holiday cards. She claims to this day that the cartoon strips I created were imaginative, original, the characters so expressive! She mailed me a batch of them recently; all I could do was wonder where that Kelly went--the one with an original bone in her body.

I've never--in my adult memory--been able to come up with original ideas or artwork. I trace. So while Mom is the artist in the family, winning prizes with her watercolours, I've always been drawn more to graphic design and illustration. But I've never taken a class, never answered that soft little voice that pipes up whenever I see a well designed bill board or handsome window display with a limited palette and crisp, clean lines. The voice says, "You want to do that."

And now, about to turn 54, I've finally signed up for a class. I'm only halfway through the six-week online course and already I feel as if there's nothing I cannot whip out in an afternoon or two. Graphic design has taken over my brain. I dream about it, can't drive down the street without deconstructing every billboard and restaurant awning.

I'm very glad that John Sivell has reached out to me to propose that we do a webinar this coming winter on Tutela because it has given me the drive and motivation to learn to use and apply each tool that Tony Vincent teaches us to use in Google Drawing.

Here are some things I've made while playing around today and yesterday:

pictogram for "good attendance"

reach your goal icon

could not find a Google Drawing icon - made my own

One of the best aspects of the class is getting to see what each of my classmates comes up with. We leave each other comments, constructive suggestions, kudos.

I can't wait to see what weeks four, five and six have in store.

Update: I forgot to say that one important driving motivator behind my signing up for this class was my wish to know how to present an online class using Google Classroom. I'm keen to know how we teachers can give workshops to each other without the need to be hosted by one of our universities or professional associations. So far it looks very promising!

Having Fun with Graphic Tablet

The first time I tried illustrating my own ESL worksheet, I used the free software that came with my computer (Paint or something similar) and my finger on the trackpad. With these two tools, I was able to create rudimentary line drawings for my activity pack for Mo Stays Warm.

But as I bounced from application to application, joining user forums while going through tutorials multiple times, I continued to struggle with concepts like layers, smoothing, etc. My fantasy was that someone would just GIVE me Photoshop and send a digital native to my house for my personal tutoring sessions each evening.

Then by some serendipitous miracle, I learned of the existence of an affordable ($99 CAD) graphic tablet. I watched a few online demos of a lovely woman creating impressive oils, pastels and watercolours using nothing but her little stylus and some free (with the purchase of the tablet) software. After that, there was no hope for me. I had to have it.

I'm pleased to report that this little tool is my new best friend when it comes to creating my own settlement English materials. The software (ArtRage Lite) is super intuitive. Within hours I had succeeded in replicating the pastel in the tutorial.

I experimented with tracing a photo using the felt tips and some watercolour.

Some features stumped me at first, but I relied on user forums for help, though trial and error is more fun.

And now, several weeks later, I am using the Intuos Draw and ArtRage Lite whenever I need graphics for my classroom materials.

And that's my happy joy joy post for this week. How about you? What floats your boat as an English language teacher?

How I Use the Literacy Activity Packs

I apologize.

I was rushing on October 2nd and didn't do a good job. Let me try again to describe how I build a week-long module. This time I will get much more into specifics regarding how I use the activity packs that I have been uploading to the LITERACY area of the website.

Staying within a Theme
Though I don't always spend an entire month on the same theme, I do think it is beneficial to the literacy learner to stay within a theme for more than one week. Why? I say this because with literacy learners, it takes a lot longer to activate the schema and prime the brain for the topic(s). Once you've warmed them up for one set of linguistic terms and cultural concepts, why would you want to burden their cognitive load unnecessarily by jumping from topic to topic? Why not settle in a while and allow them to become really comfortable as they layer more and more skills and a richer vocabulary within the same theme week by week? The lower the stress, the more room there is for fun, and I would argue that retention of the new language increases.

Starting with a Needs Assessment
Since settlement English programs are student-centred, you will have consulted with the learners via a needs assessment to determine how to prioritize the topics. I have found over time that some topics cannot be optional. One example is learning about our PBLA binders; another is learning personal information and calling 9-1-1.  I also weave lessons on phonics, decoding skills, and printing into the thematic modules without asking the learners if they want that.

Mapping Out the Modules
When planning a series of four interrelated modules within a month-long theme, I start with a couple of modules that are heavy on skill building and end with a module or two that take advantage of the learners' new abilities. Just as a lesson starts off with more scaffolding and more controlled activities, gradually reducing the need for 'training wheels,' so can a module or series of modules be constructed so that students are using language more independently by the end. They can also be reading about the topic at a higher literacy level or with more fluency by the end of a module or series of modules when you stay within a theme.

An Example of Layering Modules
Let's say the theme is housing and the house. My series of modules might look like this:
Week 1 - learn the names of the rooms and a few key furniture pieces for each room
Week 2 - learn to read a house-related story in Talk of the Block short vowel series, HOME volume
Week 3 - learn to read Perminder's Cleaning Day
Week 4 - learn to ask the landlord to address problems in the apartment

Key Resources
The resources I would use to execute the modules listed above could include: a picture dictionary; student-made reference materials from flyers and catalogs; HandsOn!; Talk of the Block, ESL Literacy Network's Readers and Read Aloud versions of the same readers; ESL activity kits from Community Legal Education Ontario (CLEO); my own activity packs.

My Activity Packs
The resources I've listed above almost never come complete with sufficient activities to give the learners the number of linguistic affordances (opportunities to encounter the new language in a variety of contexts and ways) that I believe are necessary for long-term retention of the language. I have therefore developed the habit of creating my own set of activities that I use week after week. I simply change the vocabulary while keeping the activities pretty much the same. To see a sample, check out my activity pack for Deng Starts School.

One huge benefit to this habit of staying with a limited number of activities is that it vastly reduces cognitive load that otherwise would be devoted to instructions for the task. Students become so familiar with our routines that their entire cognitive load belongs to the linguistic and cultural content of the lesson. This level of confidence on the part of the learners means that when a new student joins the class, a peer will always jump in and show the new student the ropes.

An activity pack will typically start with easier controlled activities such as:

• Match the word to the picture
• Word Shapes worksheet
• Listen and fill in the (first, middle, last) letter
• How many times can you find the word?

It will include guided and more difficult but still relatively controlled activities, such as:

• Unscramble the sentence
• Gap fill with no word bank (answers are in the reader)
• Crossword with no word bank (some schematic knowledge, some verbatim from reader)

I try always to include a peer survey. This can be used as a free activity, giving students an opportunity to use new questions and answers related to the real-world task or it can be used to help activate the schema and prior knowledge at the beginning of the unit.

Finally, I include two activities to be used at the end of the week to solidify rapid recognition of our new lexis:

• Flyswatter game (I often don't include this as a document in the pack because teachers can simply print the words across the board)
• BINGO grid with word bank

Incorporating the Activities into Lesson Plans
At the beginning of the week I remind students of our needs assessment so that they recognize the module as being an answer to their expressed need. This helps give them confidence to communicate to me any desire to slow down, repeat, add new material.

As I place activities into lesson plans, starting with a hook, I try to be mindful of how the student will be feeling after one activity. To keep a fast PERCEIVED pace, which has nothing to do with actual pace, I strive to give them a change in activity about every 20 minutes. I endeavour to go back and forth between work that focuses on meaning (e.g. T/F quiz) and work that focuses on form (e.g. printing). I also try to break up periods of sitting and concentrating with bursts of movement and interaction.

Of course all the while we are building toward one or more real world tasks such as asking, "Excuse me, where's the sugar," understanding, "On aisle six, with baking," and responding, "Thank you."

A Snapshot
So a typical day might unfold like this:

12:30 - announcements

12:35 - review the alphabet and sounds

12:40 - review the prior day's learning (if it's Monday, ask each other about our weekends)

12:45 - hook - activate the schema, brainstorm, elicit prior knowledge

12:55 - introduce the new lexis, reader, etc.; students predict from pictures, pass around picture flashcards, etc.

1:05 - matching words to picture (project onto board)

1:15 - take up the worksheet by projecting it on the board, students come up and draw the lines

1:25 - work with word flashcards - one set per partnership; teacher says, "Show me X, show me Y..."

1:35 - categorizing activity - students group the picture or word flashcards in some way, such as by part of speech, by type of object, by sound, etc.

--BREAK--

2:00 - Introduce a short dialogue, such as "Do you like _____?" "Yes, I do / No, I don't." Give students a chance to practice it verbally many, many times in various ways. These exact phrases will appear on the upcoming peer survey.

• Repeat after T
• Teacher plays role of A, students take turns taking role of B
• Chain drill around the room
• Write the dialogue on the board. Read and speak.

2:20 - Project the peer survey form on the board, demonstrate. Make sure students remember how to say "How do you spell your name," and can spell their names. New students are allowed to cut corners (copy instead of speaking). Veteran students are strongly encouraged not to 'cheat.' Hand out the peer survey. Teacher always participates.

2:40 - Do a plenary activity with the results of the peer survey, such as forming 3rd person singular statements about others. Ali likes tomatoes. Jenna doesn't like tomatoes. (Note that you have now covered all forms of this grammar point: question, positive and negative answer, positive and negative statement in first and third person.)

2:50 - Written sentences summarizing our peer survey findings or start a puzzle. (Teacher is now free to start cleaning up the classroom.)

Extending with Online Games
There are times when I need a little ten-minute filler activity and the students need a change of pace. In that moment, I'll be so glad I loaded the week's words and sentences from their text into Spelling City. Our school pays about $74 CAD per year for up to 25 students at any given time to use the premium activities. If you only want spelling test and a few games, you can get a free account. Since I believe the Sentence Unscramble game has enormous value to the learners, I have the premium account.  In a given week, I might use Hang Mouse once, Sentence Unscramble once, and then link to the word list on the classroom blog so that the learners themselves can opt to practice our week's lexis using these same games and quizzes. 

The Week
I tend to stick to a rather predictable pattern through the week:

Monday - presentation, controlled activities, take pictures for LEA books

Tuesday - skill building, practice reading, paragraph unscramble in pairs, phonics

Wednesday - iPads, reading circles, gap fill, posters, practice reading

Thursday - comprehension quiz, peer survey, flyswatter game, role plays, assessments

Friday - learning logs, BINGO, computer lab

Conclusion
So those are some routines I follow in order to reduce the cognitive load on me and on the learners! When the students are highly familiar with an activity, they do not rely on me to spend my time and energy explaining and re-explaining, wrangling and redirecting them. This frees me up to help struggling students, tick boxes on rubrics, or prepare for the next activity.

What do you think?

Fleshing Out a Module

Last week I told you I would upload the materials I developed for one of the weekly modules. Well, I've spent the afternoon over at the website uploading all the materials AND rubrics I used in the first week of our October FOOD theme.

The literacy learners did cook a squash (we borrowed a microwave from another department). We created a Language Experience Approach book and had a lot of fun all week. You can download the book, the activity pack in MS Word, and a puzzle by going to LITERACY - FOOD on my website. You are free to modify this to suit your needs. You can use some or all of it. As always, you will need KG Primary Penmanship Lined font installed on all machines on which you plan to open my literacy activity packs. It's free from Kimberly Geswein, though I'm sure she'd appreciate a donation.

Because many teachers are finding PBLA implementation to be a bit stressful and overwhelming, I have begun including in my free resources area any rubrics that I develop to go along with the activities. The images on them are in the public domain and I have licensed them under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial share-alike international license. That means please attribute the work to me, please also share it with others, and do not make money from it.

For teachers of higher levels, I have also uploaded a level 4 or 5+ reading assessment for TD Canada Trust savings and chequing account schedules and the accompanying rubric. Look under FREE - Settlement Themes - Banking.

If you appreciate what I do, please leave me a comment. It's my only payment.