EAL/D Demonstration Lesson: Why Dogs Are So Cute!

Wednesday 20th March 2024

IPSHA EAL/D Collegial Hub Meeting Term 1, 2024

Hi Everyone,

How do we identify quality teaching and learning in EAL/D? Discuss

As we know, what is good for EAL/D learners is good for all English learners. Classroom teachers can use these strategies to assist all learners in their classroom and provide the supports, scaffolds and useful resources to engage and assist learning during English lessons.

What would you say are the top 5 ingredients to a successful learning experience? Discuss.

My Top 5 Ingredients:

  1. Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning: What are we trying to achieve through this lesson? Knowing the goals, the learning intentions and success criteria to ensure you are clear about your lesson objectives and how students will be able to demonstrate their abilities. How will this be assessed? What are we looking for?
  2. Knowing the content and how to teach it: Professional Knowledge to create content, provide relevant resources, suitable content for student engagement. Do you have all of the facts and relevant tools/ resources to use for student success?
  3. Knowing your students and how they learn: Nobody knows your students better than you! Knowing your class and their specific needs, you will be able to plan for them to be successful in their own way, is this lesson accessible for all? What scaffolds will be required, who will need more assistance to access this lesson, who will require extension? How will I differentiate and offer different levels so that all can feel and achieve success?
  4. Create and maintain a supportive and safe learning environment: Do we have what we need in our environment to give students options to learn in their way? Varied spaces, learning zones, areas to work independently or as a group. Do we have agreements and expectations about how we work together? Creating a safe learning environment will allow students to feel able to take risks, problem solve and collaborate, push themselves out of their comfort zone, without fear of judgement or criticism.
  5. Student Engagement and Fun! Have you given the children choices to learn in a way that suits them? Do you have resources for visual or hands on learners? Are there elements of play or individual creativity? How are you providing the opportunity for student voice and choice?  Is this lesson fun? If not fun, maybe interesting, sparking curiosity, creating a challenge that is intriguing… etc Are the students engaged?

Below is a demonstration lesson I planned for St Peter’s Girls. I was provided with the Learning Intention and Success Criteria. I knew I would be teaching a group of twelve Year 4 students and there would be girls with varying levels of English proficiency.

  • Learning intention:

We are learning about foregrounding and how to use attention grabbing information to begin a paragraph.

  • Success Criteria:

I can use foregrounding to write a paragraph on “Dogs are cute”.

As I didn’t know my students, I brought along many varying levels of resources about dogs, some digital, some printed books and translating tools on my iPad.

Some of you have just seen this presentation at the IPSHA EAL/D Collegial Hub Meeting at St Peter’s Girl’s School.  As promised, here are the resources I used in the lesson:

PowerPoint: Dogs Are So Cute!

Booklet Resources:

You can view the video of my PPT presentation below:

Here is also the video link to the video clip about Pip, the guide dog:

Enjoy

I hope you find these resources useful, feel free to download and adapt to suit your needs.

Thanks

Please leave me feedback in the comments below.

Kind regards

Jade Peartree

The Art of Inquiry; Kath Murdoch, Staff PD Day, Session 1

Tuesday 15th March, 2022. Whole Day Staff PD (Pupil Free Day)

Today we began our St Andrew’s inquiry journey with Kath Murdoch! To say I am excited is an understatement!  I wrote five pages worth of notes (sadly, I’m not kidding!). Here is a summary of the day and my key take aways that I think are worth sharing. 

Cannot wait to continue the process together as a staff. There were so many wonderful moments from today’s PD, it is impossible to document them all. I will say that it felt like having professional conversations with a friend, everyone was open minded, eager to contribute and passionate about the topic at hand. Aren’t we lucky to have such a great opportunity to work with great minds. 

 What is Inquiry? 

Kath described inquiry as such, “The essence of inquiry is absolutely about wonder, curiosity and seeking answers to our questions”.  Inquiry is a way of being, a stance. It is not a subject or a lesson.  Inquiry is a sustained, perpetual curiosity.  Cultivate this curiosity.  

What does inquiry based learning mean to you? (my reflection)

  1. Discovering answers to our questions 
  2. Exploring ideas, questions and concepts 
  3. Forming understandings through an inquiry process

Lessons from today’s session:

These were four of the practices for inquiry teaching and learning that we focussed on today. These come from Kath Murdoch’s The Art of Inquiry cards.  

  1. Cultivating Curiosity: When do we give children the opportunity to share their curiosity and wonderings? Not just classroom topical wonderings, their life wonderings. What materials and opportunities do we provide in our classrooms to spark that curiosity? Try to be that genuine person who shows interest in their curiosities and share your own curiosities.   
  2. Notice: The practice of noticing, it is such a significant part of the inquiry teachers repertoire. If I stay curious I am better at noticing. What helps us to notice?  Slowing down, observing, taking time to have individual conversations with students. Have space to get inside student thinking. 

    What gets in the way? Over planning, noticing but not having time to dig deeper or address this.  

  3. Grow Learning Assets: Changing the word work” to learning. “We need to finish our work: becomes “We need to continue with our learning”. Creating an awareness of building a learning toolkit, developing skills for learning and focusing on those Approaches to Learning in our inquiry journey. Using the What & How Method (see below) 
  4. Release: We need to release responsibility, give students the opportunity to do the heavy lifting themselves. Who owns the learning? Children have the right to own their own learning.  Be responsive to those moment in your classroom. Give yourself permission to go with the flow.  What can I release myself from? What do I leave behind and how can I move forward? What will best serve my students? I owe it to myself and my students to release.Flipping the gradual release model to rapid release.  

 

The practice I will be focussing on first is “Grow Learning Assets” but I was also very much drawn to “Release”.  One step at a time! Slow down. 

Grow Learning Assets and the What? & How? Method.  

The what is what we are learning about, the how is an approach to learning skill.  

Eg. What: What can we do to help others belong? How: As thinkers, how can we analyse information to understand it better.

I will use the What and How method to actively engage my students in their awareness in their learning and inquiry process. 

I work in small groups or 1:1 with EAL/D students. I wonder, in a classroom setting is it easier to release? When working in small groups for language intervention and support, we have goals for our non-English speaking learners, based on their lack of language and communication skills, we need to assist and model a lot of the language and learning. How can I employ more of my inquiry based teaching skills in what I do? 

I already use a play-based approach. Usually I set up a provocation or something to play with that will naturally encourage conversations and play. These playful scenes usually mirror their own classroom settings, or units of inquiry to help front load some vocabulary. From here we introduce new vocabulary and practise saying new words, sentences and phrases that accompany that type of play. I play alongside the learner and model the language. This is a starting point and I am eager to explore this further in our future sessions with Kath.

Exciting times at St Andrew’s.

Until the next session.

Creating Digital Books & Student QR Codes

Hi Everyone,

It has been a while since my last blog post, I’ve been rather busy adapting to full time work after returning from maternity leave this year. I feel I’m managing quite well but my blog has been sadly neglected. Until now!

Recently I stumbled across this link to Julie Smith’s Blog called The Techie Teacher:

https://www.thetechieteacher.net/2019/05/how-to-create-audio-qr-kids.html?fbclid=IwAR1t01mnr_1RIsjgwJvc4tKLyT3-spPyt_UTmfi42Xa6zKlJbhltUCYMqvo

I have always wanted to do this with my students and thought Term 3 was the time to start this process. I have had staff at my school ask me about sharing how my class did it, so this blog is dedicated to my coworkers at St Andrew’s School.

Firstly, I decided what my intention for learning would be for this task. I have been focusing on developing greater fluency, expression and pronunciation when my students read aloud. With this in mind, I decided to create audio books for our school library. I told my students they needed to choose a picture book, read it for a week and practise their reading, keeping their fluency, expression and clear pronunciation in mind. We would be recording their voices, reading their chosen books and sharing them in the school library. Their books needed to be suitable for young children (ELC to Year 2), however older children may also enjoy listening to them.

After reading their books at home all week, they were ready to record! We used iPads and an app called Book Creator, which is a way of creating digital books. If you’ve never used it, I would highly recommend giving it a try.

Students took photos of each page of their picture book and then recorded their voices on each page. We then shared our digital books from Book Creator to Seesaw. Our school uses Seesaw as a tool for communication with parents and to document student learning in a digital format. If you haven’t used Seesaw before and would like to learn more about it, please visit my previous blog post about it. I presented at EdTech SA a few years ago about using Seesaw as digital portfolios. Here is the link:

https://jadevidovich.edublogs.org/2016/07/20/edtechsa-conference-2016-seesaw-and-digital-portfolios/

We exported the book as a video to Seesaw, which meant it would automatically play for our viewers. All we needed to do from here was share the QR Code, which Seesaw generates for you.

I screen shot their QR codes, printed them to a suitable size for our display and the children stuck them on top of the photos I’d taken of them, holding a mini whiteboard as shown here:

Once this was done the children cut out their pictures, glued on their QR codes and we laminated them and attached a large black binder clip to the feet to help them stand up. I also asked my students to write a brief summary of their book and a 5 star rating, we used Comic Life to get the speech bubble template.

Here is what our library display looks like:

I also created a step by step instruction guide for students to help them learn how to view our stories using the iPads. You can find the attachment of that document here and download it and adapt it to your task. It’s as simple as opening the camera on the iPad, holding it up to the QR code and then clicking the link that pops up to take you to the story.

Read a Digital Audio Book

I hope you can see the value of this task and adapt it to suit one of your learning intentions within your classroom. The possibilities are endless! I was speaking to our school Italian teacher, she could record students speaking Italian and share their dialogue with students and parents, create a translator or a set of phrases to assist with Italian pronunciation. Then I was talking with a passionate science teacher and suggested he use it for recording the methods of experiments, videos of the experiments, documenting the scientific process along the way. What about Music lessons, Art, Dance, PE? So many possibilities.

ACARA Links: English Content Descriptors:

  • Use software including word processing programs with growing speed and efficiency to construct and edit texts featuring visual, print and audio elements (ACELY1685 – Scootle )
  • Use interaction skills, including active listening behaviours and communicate in a clear, coherent manner using a variety of everyday and learned vocabulary and appropriate tone, pace, pitch and volume (ACELY1792 – Scootle )
  • Understand how to apply knowledge of letter-sound relationships, syllables, and blending and segmenting to fluently read and write multisyllabic words with more complex letter patterns (ACELA1826 – Scootle )
If you have any questions please post them in the comment thread below.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about digital books and QR codes.

Thanks.

Jade Vidovich