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Context Melrose Elementary is located in a predominantly Latino neighborhood. The school demographics reflect this population; 78% of the students at the school are Latino. The school tries hard to meet the needs of its population. Students are placed into bilingual or "sheltered" English programs. The classroom in which I teach is a sheltered first grade classroom. Most of the children have been in the sheltered program at Melrose for the whole period of their brief academic careers. They know each other well and appear to be comfortable with each other. In my classroom, eighteen of the twenty students are English Learners. Seventeen students come from homes in which Spanish is the native language. One student speaks Cantonese at home. A vast majority of the children speak and understand a good deal of English, although they struggle with many vocabulary words. As first graders, their oral language skills tend to be stronger than their written skills. Most of them are really just beginning to read and write. They are learning the sounds that the letters make, they are learning phonics, and how to blend sounds to make words. They are, slowly, beginning to write. They appear hesitant when writing, typically asking me how to spell something rather than using their own invented spelling. I've noticed that many of the English Learners in the classroom are really struggling with the "th" and "sh" sounds. They have a difficult time hearing the difference. This is complicated by their lack of vocabulary in English. Every day I make a point of reviewing the meaning of the words they are learning to read. I ask questions to reveal what they already know about the words in the lesson. I describe the meanings of the words they don't know. Often, I draw pictures on the board to help make the meanings of words clear. These struggles with vocabulary and with certain sounds motivated me to plan a lesson to work on both issues.
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Goals My short term goals for the children were to help them become more comfortable with the new sounds and to be exposed to new vocabulary. This is in keeping with the Intermediate level of ELD standards for Oral Language: "talk about school-related activities by using expanded vocabulary" and for Written Language: "Recognize English phonemes that do not correspond to sounds students hear and produce" and "Recognize sound/symbol relationships and basic word-formation rules." This activity also corresponds to the California State Standards for First Grade 1.4 Phonemic Awareness. My long term goals include helping the children to be able to participate more readily in their reading and writing assignments. Procedures I plan to call a group of five students over to a side table. I will explain that we will be working with the "th" and "sh" sounds. I will show them the cards with these letters on them. I will explain how a picture sort works; I will divide the sound cards on the table, and then will pick up one of the picture cards and model the decision-making process. I will look at the card; ask myself what it is a picture of. I will name the picture out loud, slowly, and repeat the word a couple of times. Then I will tell the children that I am looking at the letters and thinking about those two sounds. I will repeat the name of the picture and try to fit it under one of the sound cards. I will ask them for help. The second picture, we will "sort" together. Then I will go over all of the pictures with them. I will ask them to tell me the names of the pictures they know. As a group, we will try to name all of the pictures. Once all of the pictures have been named, I will ask them to sort the pictures on their own. When they have finished, we will talk about this activity and go over the sorted columns. I will be sure to repeat the names of the pictures several times. I will ask the children to help me with this. At the end, I will either ask them to glue their word sorts onto a piece of paper, or I will take photographs of the final products. Rationale I decided to do a picture sorting lesson utilizing the sounds "th" and "sh." I felt that this would help clarify the sounds for the children, as well as helping them build their vocabulary. I chose to work with a small group so that I would have the opportunity to observe the children closely. I selected a group of English Learners, made up of children who are struggling a bit more than the rest of the class. I wanted them to have a chance to work at their own pace, rather than racing to keep up with the rest of the class the way they do during typical lessons. I found the materials needed for this project in Words Their Way by Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton, and Johnston (2004).
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The Lesson After consulting with my cooperating teacher, I selected a group of four English learners, including the child I had chosen to study. During a workshop time in the classroom, I sat the group at a side table and began to explain the task to them. I took out the "th" and the "sh" letter cards and placed them on the table. I reminded the students of these sounds and we practiced making the sounds together. Then I began to take the picture cards out of my bag. I started to explain the lesson, modeling the sorting process for the students with two of the picture cards. After that, they couldn't wait through any more of my explanation. The students seated closest to me immediately started picking up the picture cards and attempting to sort them. Due to the children's haste, I abandoned my plan of going over all of the picture cards first with the whole group. It just seemed as if they could not wait for this. Also, I was surprised by how readily they understood the goal of this activity. I decided to let them work independently, so I could observe where the challenges surfaced for each individual child. I managed to get them to wait until everyone had a set of cards. Then they began the process together. Immediately after placing the letter cards on the table, one of the students was called away from the group to do a Math assessment with my cooperating teacher. I found this disappointing, since this particular student appears to struggle more with certain English sounds and with vocabulary than any student in the class. One child successfully sorted about half of his cards before he came to a picture he couldn't label. The two other students, both girls, moved more slowly, although they both appeared to grasp the object of the lesson. Whenever any of the students came to a picture they couldn't identify, I supplied the word for them. They would then sort the words into the appropriate columns. I noticed that the two girls seemed to move slowly and required frequent reminders about words to describe the pictures. The boy moved more quickly, and would sort the cards as soon as he heard me identify them. Consequently, he didn't ask me to label the cards more than once. I found this to be an interesting phenomenon, especially since I don't think his oral English skills are generally as strong as those of my target student (one of the girls in the group). When the students had completed the sorting process, I asked them to glue the pictures they had sorted down on a piece of paper. Normally, I wouldn't do this with a word sorting activity, since I would want the students to be able to use the picture cards again and again--to help them solidify their emerging skills. This time, however, I wanted to have a record of their work. I found, as indicated below, that the significant amount of scaffolding required by the students to complete this activity resulted in extremely similar final products. Therefore, I have not uploaded samples of the work...since I don't feel that there is anything to glean through studying them.
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Assessment In terms of assessment, I would consider my observations of my target student's participation in the picture sort as evidence of her learning. I had thought that I would be able to evaluate the learning of the group based on the final product produced by the completion of the word sort. However, as it turned out, the students required significant scaffolding to access the vocabulary they needed to complete the sort. So, in this case, my observation of the students while they were engaged in the process seems more meaningful to me. Given what I observed, I think my student (as well as the other students in the group) is beginning to grasp the difference between the "th" and "sh" sounds, although she occasionally makes mistakes. What my student really showed me was that she needs help in expanding her vocabulary in English. I noticed how difficult it was for her to hold in her memory the new English word I gave her to describe something. Unless she sorted it immediately into a column, she had to ask me for the word repeatedly. I realized that a great deal of repetition would be necessary for my student to truly build her vocabulary. This lesson did provide exposure to new vocabulary, but certainly was not the definitive learning tool guaranteed to help my student learn new words. More practice, more repetion is necessary for my student to really build her skills. In terms of assessing my own teaching, I think teaching this lesson really pointed out how hard it is to keep students together as a group when giving initial instructions. For this particular exercise, it might have been better for me to explain the activity first, then get out the materials. The children were so interested in the materials that they wanted to jump right in. This wasn't a bad thing, but I felt that the children in the group who tend to be more hesitant might have felt more confident if I had explained first and made it imperative for everyone to start together. I've been thinking about how I could have introduced the vocabulary more efficiently. I followed the strategy of supplying a word to each child who asked me to do so, on an individual basis. Was this helpful? Should I have insisted that we go over the words together as a group, as per my initial lesson plan? Possibly...this would have given me a chance to let the children tell stories about the new words, which may have helped the whole group remember the words. It was just so hard to try and slow them down. I've been thinking about how I might do that if I taught such a lesson again. I think the best thing about the lesson was that it gave the children exposure--to a new activity and to new vocabulary. They all enjoyed working with the materials and, I think, the physical nature of the task provided a welcome change to their typical school day. I felt that it was successful in this way. The lesson did give them a chance to practice with the new sounds, a chance to practice classifying, and exposure to new vocabulary. I think I did meet my short term goals in teaching this lesson.
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Reflection Based on what I observed over the course of this lesson, I am determined to continue to help the students in my classroom build their vocabulary. I think this is important for all of the students, not just the English Learners. I've noticed how important repetition is in terms of building language skills. That is a good reminder for me, since I often forget just how much repetition is necessary. Building vocabulary will assist all of my students in their development of academic language. The more words they know/understand, the more they will be able to participate and experience success in the language arts curriculum in the classroom. If I were to teach this same lesson to the same students again, I would follow the advice of one of my colleagues and expose the students to the pictures and vocabulary repeatedly before asking them to complete the picture sorts. I didn't do that this time because I wasn't sure how to fit it in to my cooperating teacher's schedule. But I can see how important this front-loading can be--the repetition would have helped my students actually learn the new words, and might have helped them feel more successful as they completed the picture sorts. Both outcomes are, to my mind, important for the development of academic language. In terms of planning curriculum with academic language development in mind, I learned that planning an activity for first graders can be relatively simple. They are just at the beginning stages of academic language development, so that most curricular activities would serve to help them build skills in this area. I also learned, at least in my classroom, how important vocabulary development is for successful academic language development.
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