View vocabulary builder proforma here
Today we’ve been doing a vocabulary exercise in Society and Environment. I decided to add this step at the beginning of a research task comparing students’ country of origin to Australia after reading Powerful Ways, an ESL pedagogy document. I’ve found in the past that students had difficulty simply understanding the research questions, let alone answering them.
As this is the first week of a rearranged class where four students have had to come up from a lower class, I’ve had kids working and talking together to help the weaker ones, practise speaking English incidentally as they work and to get to know each other better and feel more comfortable knowing that they can help each other and that the new kids aren’t going to be abandoned. It’s been a really nice couple of lessons with a nice feel in the class and the kids completing the exercise successfully using context to keywords and guesses to predict meaning and then using dictionaries to confirm those meanings.
I’ve made proforma copies of these vocabulary building sheets and distributed them to my colleagues in ESL and also in the English and Science departments.
A place to reflect on what’s been happening in my class, what’s worked and what hasn’t, test ideas and to gain feedback from others.
