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.

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?

PBLA with Literacy Learners

Do you teach at a school that uses Portfolio Based Language Assessment (PBLA)? At my school, we have been ramping up for it for quite some time. We've had lots of training, have attended workshops and webinars, and have implemented many parts of PBLA to some extent. But this winter we are expected to have it all up and running. It is both exciting and overwhelming! My colleagues and I are happy to see that there are still more PBLA workshops and webinars being offered through Tutela.

To make things easier on myself, I am going to have to find ways to be more efficient. First and foremost, I have to get well organized.  One thing I did on Friday was start a new section in my file cabinet for blank rubrics, blank inventory sheets, etc. This way when a new student enrols, I can send him/her out with the teaching assistant and one of each of the portfolio pages that the student needs catching up on, such as the "My Story" page, an inventory sheet at the beginning of each section, and so on.

Meanwhile, I continue to build the FREE RESOURCES areas of my website. I've made some progress over the past couple of weeks beginning to build a separate LITERACY area where my free worksheets and activity packs are arranged thematically. There are still many more themes for me to upload, but it's a start.  Take a peek and tell me what you think. It is my hope that the layout makes it easy for you to quickly find what you're looking for.

This brings me to the main reason for today's blog post. In getting ready for PBLA for literacy, I have been developing my own very simplified rubrics that literacy learners can understand. Svetlana Lupasco gave me the idea to use graphics of a growing seedling to represent the concepts of initial, developing and adequate competency on a task. I am considering uploading rubrics such as this one as I develop them and including them either in the activity pack or with other resources on that thematic page.

What do you think? Would that be useful to you?

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?

Technical Difficulties

The new school year is off to an amazing start, and I had truly been looking forward to posting about it here today.  However, my beloved laptop is in the shop for trackpad replacement (spilled coffee, ahem), and I am left with a borrowed iPad or the option of a 20-minute drive back downtown to compose this on a work PC.

Since I spent over three extra hours there on Friday (PBLA) and another three doing prep yesterday, I choose to postpone this blog post until I get my laptop back on Tuesday. I really prefer working from the comfort of my home when possible since the places where I can access a computer at work cut me off from both sunshine and fresh air.

In the meantime, I leave you with a few questions.

How do you feel about September?  Do you like fall weather? Is it exciting to be back in the classroom (assuming you are)?

What goals have you set for yourself for the new term?

How Should I Organize My Free Literacy Materials?

With school starting back up and a new literacy teacher joining our team, I am feeling motivated to go through and edit / improve all the activity packs that I have created both for the ESL Literacy Network Readers and for the Talk of the Block short and long vowel series of books. I did have some of these activity kits housed on Bow Valley College's teacher showcase area, but they discontinued that feature in their transition from ESL Literacy Network to Centre of Excellence in Foundational Learning.

As I go through and ensure that my materials follow best practices for literacy materials and contain only images that can be freely shared without copyright infringement, I will be posting them on my website.

Here's my question for you.

Where / how should I organize these materials?  Is there a teaching resource website whose layout and organization you find especially user friendly? Do you find the current layout of my website www.kellymorrissey.com easy to navigate? If not, why not? What would you have me do differently?

I am currently planning to put the activity kits in their own section at the top or bottom of the existing thematic pages. These pages follow the settlement themes (housing, commercial services, banking and money, etc.)  Do you think this is a good plan?

Alternately, I suppose I could create separate page or pages containing ONLY literacy worksheets, links, ideas, etc.

Please let me know in the comments section below which plan appeals more to you as a user of my website.

Thank you so much!

Taking a Break for Revolution

Sorry, ya'll.

I know I haven't been posting each Monday the way I intended to.

I have been super involved in revolting against plutocracy in the United States, my first country. It takes a lot of time and energy to overthrow the oligarchy.

Wish me luck.

I'll continue here when I have the ability to put my whole heart into it, as I was doing before the advent of our "Democracy Spring."

P.S. You can still follow my weekly posts that I create with links to worksheets, videos and activities for my seniors' class HERE.  I post weekly for my literacy class HERE.

Seeking Good Listening Resources

In response to demand from my morning students, ten out of fourteen of whom are Chinese, I am currently seeking the best of the best in the way of listening materials, resources and ideas. 

At one of the TESL Ontario conferences that I attended, I was lucky enough to find a very good workshop on helping our students improve their listening skills. I'll start our new course with those ideas, but I'm going to need at least one or two good texts with CDs that could be my "go to" resources--if such an animal even exists!

The listening texts I've seen at conference book sales and in my colleagues' cabinets have all left me feeling a bit meh. As I thumb through them, I notice they are often full of photos or cartoons of young people talking about going to a disco or to the beach together. They are getting ready for the prom or discussing the popularity of Beyonce's latest hit.  Those materials do not light the fire of a 70-year-old survivor of the Cultural Revolution.

Topics that DO interest my morning students include such things as avoiding phone scammers, frugal living, food security, thrift shopping, diets that contribute to longevity, etc.

Do you have any recommendations for me?

Free Worksheets for CLEO Tenants' Rights Series

Hello and welcome!

I have something to offer you and something to ask of you this week.

My question is for those of you already implementing Portfolio Based Language Assessment (PBLA), especially if you teach literacy or a low level.

In my literacy class, we are spending four weeks building skills toward being able to communicate needs and complaints to the landlord. During week one, we read "Jack's Apartment" in the Talk of the Block short vowel series - Home. Week two revolved around being able to read "A Crack in the Tub" in the same series.

We are just building vocabulary and becoming more and more familiar and comfortable with the concepts of our dwellings and what can go wrong in them.

Week three our topic was rooms of the house or apartment and what furniture or appliances could be found in each room.

These past three weeks' classroom activities were not strictly limited to learning to read these simple stories about fictional Jack and his leaky bathtub. We also spent some time on each of the following:

• CVC words; we are working our way through all five short vowel sounds (TAP, BED, RIP, POT, TUB). 
• Being able to read analog and digital clocks in order to communicate to one another at what time we engage in various activities.
• Counting from 1 to 60 (for clock skills).
•  Functions such as being able to ask and answer "What time do you take a shower / eat breakfast?"
• More practice with "how many" in the context of "How many rooms are in your house/apartment?"
• Review of colours via "What colour is the (room in the house)?"

This coming week we will finally dive into the CLEO (Community Legal Education Ontario) learning activity booklet for CLB 1/2 called Tenancy Law - Maintenance and Repairs. Yes, this material is, strictly speaking, too high for them. That is why I spent three weeks helping them build vocabulary around rooms of the house and what is in a house. By the time we tackle this set of activities, they will have already learned words like landlord, stairs, hall, living room, bedroom, sink, tub, leaking, and broken.

Here's my question. If I am writing out a MODULE PLAN for my supervisor in accordance with PBLA guidelines, would one of these weeks constitute one module with the end goal of that module being the ability to read the story about Jack (not a RWT), or would the module be the entire four weeks (three weeks of skills building to get to the Real World Task of being able to talk to the landlord or write her/him a note)? My manager gives me one answer, but some colleagues disagree.

Okay. 

Now onto what I am offering YOU today. If you teach a lower level, such as Literacy Phase I or CLB 1 or 2, my activity pack for this CLEO workbook may be useful to you and your class. You can download the PDF word search puzzle, PDF word shapes worksheet and an MS Word document containing four different activities. This last item is something that you are FREE TO EDIT as you see fit (the true / false sentences currently refer to my own students by name, so you would change them). Just go to my website at www.kellymorrissey.com and then to FREE RESOURCES - Settlement Themes. Click the Canadian Law panel and scroll down to Tenancy Law.

Enjoy! (Oh, and DO let me know if you end up using these materials. It would make my day.)

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.

Why You Should Cut Up Magazines

 Of all the resource files I have in my file cabinet at school, possibly the most valuable one is the hanging file folder labelled "Powerful Pictures." It didn't take me very long to amass a wonderful collection of pictures--maybe 30 minutes spent sitting cross-legged on my living room floor surrounded by a stack of old magazines, scissors in my hand. As I flipped through the decorator and cooking magazines, news weeklies and my partner's trade journals, I stopped and cut out every intriguing picture that could be used to prompt language.

The advertisement in which a woman trying to give a bath to a large dog gets splattered with soapy water when the dog shakes off the foam would be perfect for a grammar lesson on tenses. What was she doing? What just happened? What do you think will happen next?

The possibilities with powerful photos are endless. Whenever I visit an art museum, I purchase three or four postcards to add to that file, as well. These make good poetry prompts and bases for descriptive essays.

Most recently, I went to the Powerful Pictures file during a module on English for common, everyday social situations. I was using The Grab Bag of Socializing Activities that week, and we were learning about interjections such as OUCH, YIKES, UH OH, OOPS, AWW, BOO, HOORAY, YUM and YUCK.

After the controlled and semi-controlled activities, I needed a way to see if the students could freely use the appropriate interjection for a variety of situations. Rifling through the file, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I already had one photo for almost every interjection and only had to print a couple from Google Images in order to have a sufficient supply for four groups of three to four students.

The picture of Tiger Woods with his finger to his lips would surely elicit, "Shh." The one of a bull charging a man might elicit "Yikes!" The photo of a pilot ejecting with parachute from a jet right before the jet crashed should bring out, "Whew!" A detergent advertisement showing a baby enjoying some chocolate ice cream with his clothes covered in the melting dessert could prompt both baby's "yum" and parents' "yuck," depending on one's perspective.

Pictures are especially valuable in a multilevel class since all students can simultaneously operate within their respective Zones of Proximal Development. The students really seem to enjoy any activity involving intriguing photos, and I get a lot of mileage out of them in both my literacy class and my class of seniors whose CLBs span two to seven.

In addition to this file of mine, I also keep a supply of old magazines in a box for students to use when we make posters for the classroom walls. The literacy learners cut up decor magazines and furniture store and appliance department flyers to make a poster of the house showing what is in each room. We are also working on a series of posters--one for each vowel sound that we study. We have our /ae/ poster with CAT, HAT, BAG, etc., another poster with BED, DRESS, EGGS, LEG, and a third with LIP, KICK, LID, FISH, SIT, and so on. This week we'll tackle CVC words with O and will be searching for pictures of a dog, a pot, and an ON/OFF switch.

How about you? Do you have a file full of pictures you've collected? How do you use them?

The Syrians are Coming

Because I am very busy these days helping to stage a political revolution (Go Bernie!) in my motherland, I am going to take a break from blogging this week and instead point you in the direction of a brilliantly written blog post on the TESL Ontario blog.

Maria Margaritis shares some well-researched insights on how trauma affects our new refugee arrivals in the classroom and how we can adapt our classroom practice to help more than we hinder their language learning and settlement experiences in light of what they've just been through.

I'm pleased to note that I am already doing a lot of what is recommended, such as fostering community in the classroom and providing a set of routines that learners can count on from day to day. But there are many other ideas I will be looking to implement in the coming weeks.

Thank you, Maria and TESL Ontario Blog!

Ramping Up for PBLA

Hello!

Not sure where you all are in the PBLA process, if at all, but at my school we are just getting the training and starting our pilot modules soon. I'm open to any and all tips, suggestions, links, commiseration, encouragement, etc. that you are willing to send my way as I start off with my two classes on this exciting journey!

In my morning class of eleven Chinese, three Iraqi and one Syrian senior (over 55), I am gently introducing the concepts of goal setting and reflection. This week will be our first time to write out our individual and group goals for the module. We want our goals to be SMART goals: SPECIFIC, MEASURABLE, ATTAINABLE, REALISTIC AND TIME-BOUND.

I'll let you know how it goes!

In my afternoon class, which is literacy (one Foundations learner and the rest Phase I), we have just done our needs assessment for the term via sticker voting.

learners have voted for our first four topics

For goal-setting, I am going to rely heavily on Svetlana Lupasco's resources that she was kind enough to post on her blog Teach2LearnESL. She blogged about goal-setting with literacy learners HERE, and offered up samples for free download HERE.

Many of the teachers at my centre seem to have the same challenge right now: finding really good resources to guide students through goal setting. The best I've found so far is in the PBLA Best Practices - Resources document.

How about you? For those of you further along in the PBLA journey, do you have tips for those of us just starting?

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.

Will PBLA Address My Frustrations?

If you teach in a program funded by Citizenship and Immigration Canada, as I do (the program is called LINC--Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada), then you are already using Portfolio-based Language Assessment in your classroom or soon will be. At my centre, we have begun training and will do our first pilot modules in the new year.

In one of those training sessions recently, we were fleshing out plans to incorporate PBLA practices into our teaching, such as:

• needs assessments
• the setting of language (for life) goals by the learners
• the identification by the learner of steps to be taken to reach said goals
• formative assessment by the teacher
• learner reflection (such as journaling re achievements every Friday)

As I was sitting there working on the task analysis of a sample lesson with the colleague who will be paired up with me to pilot a module, it began to dawn on me how useful some of these tools might prove to be with my morning class of seniors (see last week's post). Indeed, it seems that their biggest problem is an inability--tucked tidily into their blind spots--to make the link between a lack of progress in a given area and their failing to stretch outside the comfort zone of the small set of learning tools they brought with them to this new setting after spending five decades in a teacher-centred academic system steeped in the grammar-translation method of language learning.

That's what I'm up against. Add to that the fact that most of them are not comfortable reaching out, initiating conversations with strangers, or taking risks in the language.

But while I was sitting in that PBLA workshop, I began to envision a new kind of conversation between us in the new year. What exactly IS my goal, I want them to ask themselves. I want them to reflect on whether the tools they are currently using are or are not bringing them closer to those stated objectives. I am hoping that through reflection and self-assessment, they can begin to see that some of their tools are proving only moderately effective, while others lie in the toolbox untouched.

Well, I actually couldn't wait for the new year to begin. Since we had a short teaching week before winter break--too few days to tackle a whole topic--I decided to get them started thinking along the lines of goals and strategies. First, I threw out some discussion questions for them to address in groups of three to four, such as: 

• Why do you come to this class?
• What do you hope to achieve?
• Do you feel you are making good progress?
• What do you do to work toward your language goals?

After small group discussions, we had a plenary discussion about goals, progress and strategies. I gave them a few examples of strategies that I use when learning a new language. (I have studied about ten languages ranging from Latin and Greek to German, four romance languages, Japanese and Farsi.) I told them that when I set my mind on learning a new language, there are a couple of things I never fail to do. For one, I do whatever it takes to spend time speaking the language daily. If I can't find anyone wanting to be my friend and hang out, then I pay a tutor either with money or by bartering English lessons for their tutelage. Secondly, I label every item in my environment in the second language and read those sticky notes every time I pass by. Third, I immerse myself in the language by tuning my TV and radio to L2 content, picking up magazines and newspapers in the L2, and talking to myself in the language everywhere I go.

Some nodded agreement at these ideas while others laughed sheepishly, knowing full well they are resistant to such immersion.

With that I introduced them to the Strategic Inventory for Language Learning. They could take it home for a couple of nights to tackle all the big words with their electronic dictionaries, then we would start going over it before the break and continue in the new year. I think that's a very good place to start: with raising awareness of all the strategies we COULD add to our arsenals to give our brains many more ways to make connections.

As we were going over the first few strategies on the list, I did my best to illustrate when something wasn't clear to everyone. For example, I took a tin of jasmine green tea out of the cabinet and passed it around the room. "As you breathe in this scent, repeat the word jasmine ten times." To illustrate another strategy, I had an Iraqi student teach me two new words in Arabic. I acted both of them out (eat and walk), but one of them I also wrote on the board in Arabic script. I left it there five minutes before erasing it.  After the break, they tested me. I still remembered the word for walk, which I'd written. I couldn't remember the word for eat, which I'd only chanted while acting it out.

So! We are getting friendly with the idea that strategies matter. Some work better than others, and each of us is different with regard to what works and what doesn't. I am very much looking forward to more work with goals, strategies and reflection in the new year!

How about you? Are you implementing PBLA in your teaching? If not, are you using any of these elements in your classroom? Why or why not? And if so, are they working?

Addressing My Frustrations

I love my morning class. This group of about eleven Mandarin speakers and four Arabic speakers--all over the age of 55--is the light of my life.

And they constantly express to me how happy they are with their class, especially since we've overcome the Chinese students' reluctance to participate fully in needs assessments and what I call classroom democracy. No, they are over that. Now they boss me around, which is wonderful. They adore their little English class that I tailor to their expressed needs.

And yet...

I don't feel I am helping them nearly as much as I could be or should be. Before I get into what isn't working, let me share...

Some things that ARE working: 

• Through a 'Back to the Well' approach, I can provide lots of rich 'affordances,' meaningful encounters with the same lexis so that their brains can latch on, integrate, build connections for long-term retention of new language.
• With regard to pronunciation, by focusing more on prosody (stress, rhythm and linking) rather than on segmentals, we are noticing an improvement in intelligibility.
• I make compromises which allow Asian students to indulge in habits left over from their upbringing in a teacher-centred academic culture, such as providing all handouts at least one day before they are to be used (students can go to town with their electronic dictionaries the night BEFORE the lesson).

I'm ashamed to admit that after three years with this group, however, I'm just now starting to wrap my head around what isn't working. My students, with a couple of exceptions, are NOT meeting their stated goal of increased social integration. They are not becoming risk takers. They are not breaking their addiction to the little gadgets. They are not practicing English outside the classroom, nor even at break time. In fact, a recent speaking/listening assessment that came on the tail end of two plus weeks of preparation for it left me crestfallen.

The task seemed simple enough to me. Start a conversation with a stranger. We practiced and practiced. We paired up with each other in every conceivable way in order to get ready for this test. We used photos as cues and role played these scenarios ad nauseum. The test had a few criteria, which we went over ahead of time, pulling up the rubric on the projector board. One of the criteria involved strategic competence. 

"I will use a word you don't know," I warned them. "You will be expected to use the strategies we've been learning in order to repair the communication breakdown."

The Arabic speakers had no issue with the task. When they entered the room to be assessed and saw me hit the RECORD button on the iPad then point to the photo of the neighbour shovelling out a driveway buried under a foot of snow, they chatted me up charmingly. When I used the word squalls to see if they could recover from encountering an unknown term, they used effective strategies.

The Mandarin speakers, on the other hand, floundered. The fact that they can ace grammar tests blindfolded with hands tied behind their backs isn't doing them much good if they can't carry on a simple conversation with a smiling stranger at the bus stop, especially in light of their stated GOALS. Sigh.

So! (This is where you, dear reader, come in.) I need a new attack. I'm going to try to find everything I can find on two topics, to start with: teaching strategic competence and teaching English to Chinese students specifically. I've already found one scholarly article online indicating that being raised in a culture steeped in Confucianism can indeed hobble an ESL student in some aspects of their ESL progress. Fascinating stuff.

One thing I may do is give them the Strategic Inventory for Language Learning. This might help raise their awareness of weak areas while showing me where we need to focus more of our energies. 

Can you help me out? Can you give me ideas and suggestions and paste into the comments area links to every resource you know of that could help me build a different and more effective curriculum for this special demographic of ESL learners in the new year? I need help!

Teaching Small Talk

My multilevel class of a dozen or so Chinese and two Iraqis--all over the age of 60--has embarked upon the task of learning how to chat up strangers.

We began the unit by defining small talk and brainstorming together why we do it, when / where we do it, and HOW.

They correctly guessed that we use this superficial blather to break the ice, fill silence (with which we in this culture are not always terribly comfortable), and offer a bit of chatter to pass the time at the bus stop, train station, in line somewhere, in our apartment building or office building elevator, and so on.

We spent a couple of days learning these conversation starters, but in order not to be overwhelmed, decided to select no more than FIVE conversation starters, making sure we had at least one for a party, one that could be used to comment on any sort of weather, and one to use while strolling at the riverfront this summer when we encounter people with pets or babies in strollers. We noted that many of these could be used in multiple situations by substituting the word RAIN for SNOW, and so forth.

The next couple of classes were spent mastering TAG QUESTIONS, since they are so often incorporated in small talk. (Nice day, isn't it?)  Our reference text for this was Azar's blue book.

It wasn't difficult for me to find some nice colour photographs on Google images for us to use as practice prompts. I found a woman walking her Golden Retriever, a well-dressed man standing alone at a cocktail party, a man with a stroller at the park, someone with an umbrella waiting on a train platform, a fellow shovelling the snow from his driveway, a woman waiting for a bus, and a young lady basking in the sun at a park. These I distributed to groups of 3-4 so they could practice starting conversations in each imagined encounter.

Another grammar point I tied into this unit is that of situational ellipsis. 

"Do you think Canadians always use full sentences and full questions when engaging in small talk?" The learners let me know that they are completely aware that native speakers often communicate in one- and two-word phrases, but they don't know how to do it themselves.

This was a great time for us to delve into Scott Thornbury's little dialogue called "The Train to Oxford." The students had little trouble adding the punctuation and needed only a bit of help with intonation. (Up for Y/N questions such as "Married?" and down for wh- questions, such as "When?")

They took turns performing this role play for the class, then we spent about 20 minutes of paper and pencil time trying to reconstruct the elided elements. It was fun comparing the various versions of re-built grammar. Some turned "Oxford!" into "Oh, we've arrived at Oxford Station!" while others preferred, "This is the Oxford stop." It's all good.

For their next task, I chose to put together a dialogue between two strangers engaged in small talk at the park using artificially complete sentences and questions. If you would like a copy of this, just visit my website - Free Resources - Grammar and scroll down to Ellipsis (grammar points are arranged alphabetically).  Their job is to strip it down as far as they think possible while remaining natural or NS plausible.

After taking up the worksheet, we went back again to the photo prompts. These seniors really like to take things slowly and revisit the same material in various ways. In order to change things up a bit, this time we moved the tables and chairs out of our way and stood in two rows of seven.  I gave each A a photo prompt. We stood face-to-face, seven As and seven Bs. I explained that Bs had to initiate the conversation with this stranger, and that after about a minute, I would signal Bs to move up the row on person, with the last B coming around to talk to the first A. We did this until each B had visited every A. Tomorrow we'll repeat that, switching roles. Also to add a bit of variety, I threw two new photos into the mix: a woman with a child in a clinic waiting room and an older person with arms full of grocery bags.

I hope you can use these ideas with your group. Let me know if you do. :)

The Box

Do you ever find yourself running back to the photocopy machine for one more copy of a handout for that student who is returning after one or more days absent?

I never do.

During my TESL training in Toronto, I observed how my second practicum mentor kept an 8.5" by 11" cardboard box in one corner of the room. She put extra copies of worksheets in there, and students returning after an absence knew to look in there for any materials they had missed.

I've taken that system one step further. To ensure disorganized students don't inadvertently double dip, I always make the exact number of copies needed for my class and write the names of absentees at the top of their worksheets. The responsibility falls to the student to look in the box before class upon his or her return.

I love how this practice minimizes classroom disruption and allows us to get on with the task at hand: learning English!

How about you? Do you do something similar in your classes?

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

Store Returns (Part II)

As our unit on store returns (see last week's post) has unfolded, I have developed some materials that you can use. It's all Canadian content, using slightly adapted versions of actual returns policies of Canadian stores (Canadian Tire, Zehrs Markets, etc.).

Just go to my website www.kellymorrissey.com and then from the drop-down menu at the top, FREE RESOURCES - SETTLEMENT THEMES.  Click the "Commercial Services" panel and you will see a link to the worksheets and unit outline as a hyperlink under SHOPPING - RETURNS.

Would love to hear if you end up using this with your students.

Cheers!

Store Returns (Part I)

My class of 15 seniors (over the age of 55) are currently doing a unit on returning something to the store. We like to take things very slowly, doing a LOT of skill-building, visiting and revisiting the same lexis again and again in an engaging variety of activities.

Our first week's worth of lessons were built around LINC 3 Classroom Activities - "Returning Faulty Merchandise." This material provided a great introduction to the needed vocabulary. We took it nice and slow, so we are going into next week just now feeling ready to write our own customer-clerk role plays.

Friday is always a bit different. The students have unanimously voted for an "easy, interesting story" that ties into the topic. The text should be so easy that they can focus entirely on the prosody and pronunciation while reading aloud without being distracted by unknown words (narrowed cognitive burden). So I usually pull something from our school's LINC 1 teacher's cabinet, such as Very Easy True Stories. The lower level students in this multilevel class appreciate having a text closer to their level, and those who read at a level 5 and up are not bored since we are focusing on pronunciation.

This week I wasn't able to find a related true story, so I cut up a picture story for pairs to order, coming up with their own language for the story of a woman who buys a shirt that is too big for her husband and has to exchange it. Picture activities are IDEAL for multilevel classes.

After the break, we adjourn to the computer lab. Here are the listening links I provided this week relating to store returns. I especially love the video on the English in Vancouver blog.

Once we have written some very simple dialogues and acted them out, the next step will be to study some real stores' returns policies. I have already photocopied the returns policy that was included last week in a delivery I received from The Hudson's Bay Company. I distributed that before the weekend--retyping it in a much larger font for compliance with the OADA. The fourteen Chinese students in the class appreciate having a text at least a day ahead of time so that they can go to town with their electronic dictionaries. I like that they do their dictionary work at home, as this frees up class time for speaking and listening practice.

At this point I envision that the culmination of this unit will be a role-play activity in which the class is divided into roles of clerk and customer, as follows:

• Each clerk will be provided with a store returns policy.
• Each customer will be able to choose among three scenario cards.
• The scenario card will state what was purchased, the date it was purchased, the tender used (store credit card, other credit card, cash, debit, etc.), and the problem with the item.
• The problems will range from spoiled milk to shoes that proved to be poorly constructed after a week of wear. Some items will be eligible for refund, others for exchange, and still others will not qualify for any action on behalf of the supplier.
• Desks will be re-arranged in a big U shape.
• Clerks sit on the outside of the U and remain stationary.
• Customers sit on the inside of the U and move clockwise.
• Teacher will facilitate the movement, allowing about seven minutes for the first pairing, but speeding things up as the students move around the U, becoming ever more fluent at expressing their ideas.
• The whole exercise will be repeated the following day with former customers becoming clerks and vice versa.

Mind you, this is going to take A LOT of prep and skill-building as I do the task analysis and break it into its component competencies. We will need to learn many chunks of language, focus on pragmatics and much more to achieve this goal. Right now I'm not even sure if this will take one or more weeks. In my usual habit of letting formative assessment shape the unit as it rolls out, the students and I will work together to determine how far and how to break down the objectives.

I'm looking forward to it!

How about you? Do you have any suggestions for me as I enter week two of our store returns unit?

Mindfulness for Teachers

Yesterday TESL Windsor hosted Jennifer Elizabeth Alexander for a workshop on mindfulness. It was powerful.

Today I am acutely aware of ways in which I am not going mindfully through the day, as well as ways in which I am.  Yesterday I made a commitment to do one thing mindfully this week. I chose "eat breakfast mindfully." So this morning I made sure that I ate my oatmeal sitting down without the distraction of a newspaper, computer or smartphone. I closed my eyes and smelled the oats, flax and berries before taking a bite. I savoured each mouthful slowly. Also, I remembered to acknowledge that I am grateful to have a nourishing breakfast today.

What do I do to bring mindfulness to my classroom? Here are three ways I try to bring mindful presence to my class:

No matter how rushed I feel, no matter how many more things I feel pressured to finish before the (figurative) bell rings, if a student addresses me to ask a question or say good morning, I look up from what I'm doing and make eye contact, smile, and respond. Then I return to what I was doing. That is my intention, anyway, though I am human and know I sometimes fail.

An unspoken classroom rule in any space in which I am facilitating the lesson is: when one person is speaking, the rest of us are not speaking. We give the speaker our undivided attention. In order to attain silence and respectful attention for the speaker, I simply stand and wait for chatter to abate, then cue the speaker to continue. This is done with a pleasant expression on my face. I am not angry, rather patient--and perhaps at times a bit amused.

We begin on time, end on time and take breaks on time. One reason I respect the schedule to the minute is that it allows us to focus fully on what we're doing when we're doing it. A student who is distracted by the fact that the teacher is going over into break time is just that--a distracted student. I would rather that we be fully present for our breaks and fully present for the lesson time rather than having muddy, chaotic boundaries between them.

After posting this, I will put on my boots and take a walk on a nearby woodland trail. I need to give my soul some nourishment before embarking on a new work week.

How about you? Do you practice mindfulness?

Favourite Advice for Teachers?

What are your three favourite pieces of advice for (new or experienced) teachers?

Needs assessment in literacy class

I'll go first while you think. :)

1. Watch your TTT/STT ratio. That's Teacher Talk Time / Student Talk Time. Ideally, we shouldn't be doing more than 20% of the talking. For me, the TTT is much heavier during the presentation part of the lesson or unit, as I'm explaining new terms and helping students with pronunciation. By the "free practice" part of the lesson, I should be able to exit the classroom unnoticed. I love getting to that point!
2. Be authentic. There are teachers who do not share anything about their private lives with their students, and there are those who are completely transparent. I happen to fall into the latter category. In my opinion, authenticity helps build trust, helps create a safe space for learning and risk taking, helps the students build community with each other, and is just more fun. For me, authenticity could even be considered a form of respect.  Not only that, but I recently came across some research indicating that authentic teachers are more immune to burn-out! I can think of two colleagues who have burned out during my five years in the field; both are the type to have two personae, one for their private lives and a sort of "mask" for the classroom.
3. Do not forego the needs assessment. Even if you think you know what the students need, do it anyway. For one, you may be surprised. Secondly, even if they choose to study the exact same topics you knew they needed, having voted on it will increase their sense of ownership of their learning and boost engagement. (Check out the ASSESSMENT section of my FREE RESOURCES area on my website if you need materials for this.)

How about you? Think of that good teacher in your school who would be EVEN BETTER if she/he just did one little thing differently. What advice would you love to give him/her?

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?

LINCchat -- A New Forum for LINC Instructors!

Want to get to know other LINC teachers in Canada? Want to share ideas and resources while supporting each other through the trials and triumphs of settlement English teaching? Then the new weekly Twitter chat #lincchat may be of interest to you.

To join in the weekly chats, you will first need a (free) Twitter account. You can sign up at Twitter.com.

If you have no clue what I'm talking about, you may want to watch this great introductory video to Twitter and Twitter chats by Nathan Hall of LISTN.

Next, you will need to log into your Twitter account just before the chat time.

The next lincchat will be held October 6, 2015. The topic is "Pragmatics and the CLB." Moderators will introduce the topic and get things rolling with some questions to stimulate discussion.

Also, once you log on, a moderator will likely post a link to a platform that makes posting and reading the thread a bit easier. Just click the link. This app will even add the hashtag to the end of each of your tweets for you, so you never need to worry that you might forget to do so.

Hope to "see" you there!

What did YOU teach this week?

Having a bad cold is really no excuse. If you want to build readership of a blog, you need to stick to the promised schedule and post regularly. So I apologize.

The fact is that I had hoped to publish a post about tackling pronunciation in the ESL classroom, but the post grew so long that I'll now have to publish it in two instalments. I'm still working on it. In the meantime, why don't I just tell you what I taught this past week and which resources I found most useful?

My morning class asked to learn how to shop online. I used the English for Financial Literacy documents by the Toronto Catholic District School Board found on the Settlement.org wiki. The volume for CLB 3-5 was VERY helpful.

I also found a presentation on Decoda.ca called Shopping and Banking Safely Online, which fit our needs perfectly.

One student began using Amazon.ca as a result of what we learned during this week-long unit. However, they chose to get into a different (though connected) topic next: how to get and use a credit card.

My afternoon (LINC Literacy) class had just finished a week of learning some language to R/W/L and speak about food staples. Our second week of the FOOD unit was spent setting up the classroom just like Food Basics--our only supermarket in the downtown core. After learning shopping vocabulary such as shopping bag, shopping cart, list, aisle, frozen, canned, fresh, dairy, meat and produce, we practiced short dialogues.

For example, this was a chain drill that snaked around the class, with A holding a plastic bag and B holding a reusable bag.

A:  Do you need a bag?

B:  No, thank you. I have a bag.

We also practiced:

A:  Excuse me, where is the _______?

B:  It's on aisle ____.  (Or: It's at the back; it's in dairy; it's next to the milk; it's at the front, etc.)

A:  Thanks.

B:  No problem.

After a tour of the store, students set off in teams of three to complete a scavenger hunt. Each team had a different set of items and prices to find.  The T.A. and I took pictures of the field trip so as to be able to put the photos into a Language Experience Approach booklet. The students will add the language then learn to read it fluently over the course of a week.

I am really looking forward to the week preceding Thanksgiving. We will use the items we purchased at the supermarket to make a pumpkin pie. Yum!

What did you do with your class(es) this week?

Martine's Rule Number One

Muffled inside my backpack, the ring of my cell phone was just barely audible as I walked from my parking spot to the building where I'd just been hired to teach for four hours a week--a lunch hour pronunciation class.

I grappled with the zipper pouch in the middle of the sidewalk and managed to answer before it went to voice mail. It could be one of my colleagues calling me to supply for them, I thought. Covering for absent teachers was another role for which I was hired at the same time. My third hat was that of teaching assistant, which was why I was headed into work hours before my class time.

"Hello?"

"Kelly?" A weak and raspy voice came through from the other end.

"Yes?"

"Can you cover for me today? I woke up with a migraine."

"Sure I can," I said, already starting to feel ill at ease with the notion of zero prep time. "What's the topic?"

"Oh, there's no particular topic. Do anything you want with them."

"Thanks a lot," I said, hoping my voice didn't betray any trace of sarcasm.

She had given me no advance notice nor had she prepared anything like the other instructors always did. There wasn't even a topic to inspire me. Fortunately, I had spent a recent weekend compiling a few emergency lesson ideas for just such a circumstance. I would try out "student-made tests."

Thank goodness I'm a nervous Nellie an early bird; I had time to grab a ruler and create a simple table-style graphic organizer and make twenty copies. (Grab the free template on my website.)

After introducing myself and explaining their teacher's absence, I polled the class to find out what grammar points they had been covering over the past week or two. As they all began to chime in, I scribbled quickly, capturing their answers on the board.

Next I asked them what topic they had covered. They told me they had just finished reading The Piano, a slender chapter book abridged for ESL learners. Great.

I explained that their task would be to think up six good questions to test their classmates on the material covered over the past week or two: three about grammar and three about the novel. I would come around, I said, to help them find any errors in their questions. I then would circle what I thought were the best four out of six, and they were to copy those onto the graphic organizer.

That took us to break time.

After break, we pulled half the chairs from outside the U of tables to the inside so that pairs were facing each other.

"Partner A has five minutes to ask partner B four questions. When you hear my beeper go off, it's time to switch roles: B then has five minutes to quiz A. Then I'll ring the bell and Bs will move clockwise while As stay put. Got it?"

They got it. With five pairs, this took exactly fifty minutes, leaving us ten minutes for a debriefing before the end of class. They were supposed to rank their classmates and report at the end who had done the best job answering each question. But during the plenary discussion, something serendipitous arose from this technique. The students all said they had come to understand the material so much better. Their classmates had elucidated formerly cryptic grammar points, helped them understand the book's plot twists, and had taught them new words or given them a fuller grasp of terms already touched on in class.

As the students filed out into the hall with smiles on their faces, still abuzz with the energy of the activity, I heard the voice of my TESL prof in my head. "RULE NUMBER ONE," she said so many times that it can never leave me, "Whenever possible, have the students do the work."

Yes, Martine. I think I see what you meant.

The next time Martine's rule echoed in my mind was when I was acting as teaching assistant, observing and helping the literacy teacher. The class was about to play BINGO. How many times had I toyed with the idea of using this game in class only to reject it as too time consuming for the teacher? After all, each BINGO card has to be different since you can't have every students shouting BINGO at the same time. But this teacher did something that had never occurred to me. He put the bank of twenty-four words at the bottom of the sheet and had the students COPY them one by one into the BINGO grid, reminding them not to copy them in order starting with the top left cell, but encouraging them to scatter the words around the grid in a random way. Not only did this save the teacher prep time, but these students got an opportunity to practice copying--a skill most of them were still developing. Value!

That was over five years ago.  Now I have two classes and continue to remind myself several times a week of Martine's Rule Number One. Today in literacy class, for example, I decided to start our food unit in a way I never have before. Instead of warming them up, activating prior knowledge, yada yada, and then presenting twelve food staple words of my choosing, I passed out grocery store flyers and had the students cut out five items they buy every week. From posters each team of two created, I then told them they had to decide on the twelve terms we would learn and practice with this week. Well, we ended up with a list almost identical to the one I usually give them, but I noticed that the level of engagement seemed much higher than usual. These are the words THEY chose, the ones THEY say they need when shopping.

So, how about you? How do you feel about Martine's Rule Number One? Do you embrace a similar philosophy in your teaching? If so, how? And if not, why not?

Free Library Resource

When our newest teacher asked me the other day for a copy of the "Using the Public Library" worksheets, puzzle pieces, and unit plan that has been passed around among several of my colleagues since I developed it, I was surprised to find that I'd never posted it with other freebies on my website. That was probably because it included a transcript of an audio lesson I did not have permission to replicate or upload. So I've deleted that part, making the whole thing sharable under a Creative Commons license.

Literacy student using her new card

Literacy students comparing borrowed items

Now is a great time to plan a field trip with your students to the closest library branch. At my school, we're fortunate enough to be within easy walking distance to the main branch. I take my literacy class there each spring and fall, avoiding the walk during the broiling hot and bitterly cold months.

A unit plan and photocopiable materials for CLB 3 and up are under FREE RESOURCES - Settlement Themes - Community and Government Services. For literacy level, we spend a couple of weeks skill-building, then write a Language Experience Approach story around our trip, which we learn to read during the week following the field trip.

How about you? Do you take your class to the library to teach them how to access resources and get a free borrower's card? If you do, I really hope these materials are useful to you. Please leave a comment if they are.

That Summer Feeling

Camping and birding at Rondeau, summer 2015

As my colleagues and I greet each other in the halls the first day back after a ten-week school closure, we inevitably remark how RELAXED we all look. Some of us travelled, some had more time just to get down on hands and knees with their children or take them to the park every single day. Worry lines have disappeared from around our eyes. We are glowing with the renewed energy that comes from two straight months of far less stress in our lives.

"Do you think we can carry some summer forward into our whole year?" one new teacher muses at the copy machine.

"I sure plan to," I reply.

And I do.

A long break helped me see what a workaholic I can be. It showed me the value of taking time just to sit by the water with my icy beverage and library book. How can I carry a bit of that into my teaching year?

For a long time I've recognized in me the need to work smarter instead of working more. This year I hope to follow even more faithfully Martine's rule number one: whenever possible, have the students do the work.

So far, I'm on target. On the first day, instead of having spent any part of the prior evening dreaming up peer survey questions like, "Where did you go this summer," I had students brainstorm the questions they wished to ask one another. Instead of spending my prep time at the copy machine, I put a sample graphic organizer on the board and passed out notebook paper. The students made the peer survey grid.

I'm not sure I would ever go so far as to have students cut up pieces for info gap and unscrambling activities, but shy of that I believe there are many ways I could cut my prep time while simultaneously allowing students to take over jobs from me in ways that have value to them as language learners.

Outside the classroom, meanwhile, I intend to carry forward that summer feeling by taking more day trips, carving out weekend time for more bike rides, more walks in the woods, more live music in small venues, more open mic nights, more fiction, more movies and just in general more ME time.

By living a life with more balance, I trust my students will benefit by having a rested, relaxed, happy teacher in the classroom with them.

What about you? How do you work on a good work-life balance?

And the Winner is...

Argh. When I sat down to do this, I was already thinking ahead to how this was going to look rigged if the person with 1/6 chance of winning beat the person with a 5/6 chance of winning. But there you go. It happens. To choose a winner, I wrote out the first entrant on line one of my notebook page, and the second entrant, with five entries, on the subsequent five lines, numbering them all one to six.

Next I Googled "random number generator" and checked out the first site offering this service, which was RANDOM.ORG. Of the choices they offer, I thought "dice roll" was perfect since I needed a number one through six.

I rolled the dice and...voila.

Congratulations to Maria. I will get that gift certificate out by email right away. 

Thank you to my two sleuths who helped me clean up a lot of mistakes and broken links on the blog and website. I appreciate it.