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Best For: All Language Learners to new vocabularly

Description:
1)A word is introduced....no definition on screen.
2) Students restate or explain the new word in their own words (verbally ).3) Students to create a nonlinguistic representation of the word (a picture, or symbolic representation).* Follow up activity incorporates this word. Students engage in activities to deepen their knowledge of the new word (compare words, classify terms, write their own analogies and metaphors).

Ranking: A useful strategy to get students to understand a new word, can work for all students.

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Best For: Early Developing Language Learners (Add more words to visuals as they develop)

Description: Using images to explain to the students, especially useful if the images were something that the students had encountered before in their own culture.

Or

Draw chapter summaries when reading novels. Drawings include pictures and words.

Ranking: A great strategy to tap into the strengths of language learners (drawings) and allow them to show understanding in pictures, rather than with the language of instruction.

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Best For: Any Language Learner

Description: Every time I introduce a new important word in Spanish class, I try to draw a mind map on the whiteboard to relate the new word to similar words they know until we create the whole "lexical family".
Then, depending on the unit and the class, you can broaden this practice by completing a "lexical set" (a group of words that share the same topic or theme) or all belong to the same part of speech (they are all nouns, all verbs, all adjectives). Those are great activities to introduce and review the vocabulary incorporated in the unit. This is supported by research since, we tend to remember best when we create systems.

Ranking: It helps students, but not always in context to their world, but one good system to use.

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Best For: MYP and DP, Upper EAL students
Description: Brainwriting is simple. Rather than ask participants to yell out ideas (a serial process), you ask them to write down their ideas about a particular question or problem on sheets of paper for a few minutes; then, you have each participant pass their ideas on to someone else, who reads the ideas and adds new ideas. After a few minutes, you ask the participants to pass their papers to others, and the process repeats. After 10 to 15 minutes, you collect the sheets and post them for immediate discussion.

I tried the Brain-writing strategy with my Grade 11 Visual Arts students. I divided my 13 students into two groups based on their specialties (e.g. technical competence, communication of ideas, conceptual qualities, cultural values, languages, and general struggles), and they wrote their final piece plan on a lovely pink paper. I gave them the simple instructions like “write about your focused culture(s), skills/techniques, and sketches if you want to.” I was worried in the beginning because as this cohort have high-achievers, they might not be able to provide constructive feedback nor not sharing their personal ideas on the final piece. (Monica Hwang)

Ranking: This strategy is quite good, though not as much on EAL strategies involved, still a great chance for students to do some visible thinking!

Stir the Pot
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Best For: All grades
Description: This learning is great for introducing vocabulary at the start of a unit or discussing and sharing ideas during it.
Divide the class into groups with a number 1,2,3,4,5
All the ones sit together, twos etc
Each group is given a different word, sentence, idea to discuss.
They prepare what they are going to say to teach the other students in other groups.
Once prepared the groups mix up and share their knowledge. The teach each other and discuss ideas.

Reflection at the end of the lesson.

Class comes back together in a circle (pot) and discusses the meanings of the words, sentences etc that they have learnt.


Ranking: 5 Stars because this strategy is very flexible, adaptable to all levels and can include a wide variety of learning engagements. This works well for non written learning experiences. Good for making everyone speak and learn to share their knowledge.

Dana's Post 

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Best For: ALL!

Description: Empowering students with the tools to decipher the images and “learning to see” in their daily lives can allow them to express and communicate in much of the same ways that writing can…and it transcends language barriers. Thanks to Dana Carney for this information, you can see her much longer post on this here.  

Resources to promote visual Literacy

1. Using photos to build vocabulary, take on new perspectives, or tell stories.  This article shows practical ways to do all of the above using photography in the classroom.
2. Analyzing and interpreting visual images using Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is something we can all do on some level in our classrooms.  This is especially pertinent to using VTS with Common Core.
3. Art criticism activities can be translated through the lens of any subject matter that has images to describe, analyze, interpret or evaluate.
4. Using visual literacy techniques to navigate advertisements and propaganda.
5. Another blog post that explains the value in teaching visual literacy.

Ranking: This has so many strategies that it is hard to rank. Visual literacy is amazing! So finding the right visual literacy strategy for what you are doing is key! Look through the strategies above to pinpoint one that works for you.

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Best For: Phase 3+, MYP

Description: This activity was done by Chelsea Woods, as seen here: Chelsea's Post. Her actual activity was really to get students to sit together and talk through their analysis rather than do it on their own. She recognizes how this needs prompting at times, and how we need to focus these activities and discussions. By getting students to sit around a big poster with a task, we find they showcase several of the ATL skills (Collaboration - delegation of roles, e.g.) as well as building up group vocabulary and ideas. Putting EAL students within these groups and just raising the expectations for contributing within the group can prove to be very powerful. Combining this with other EAL Support, such as a TDOIE to build up vocabulary for students contributing would make this activity more powerful.

Ranking: The ideas behind this activity are 5-stars, but perhaps this time around Chelsea admits was only about 3 stars in how well it went and truly thinking about EAL learners. This was also geared towards older students, as PYP classes are probably more consistently doing activities like this, so more of a reminder for the Secondary to implement these wonderful ideas!

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Best For: Any grade. Modified for PYP

Description:

 Prepare talk cue cards found in Cambridge’s ‘Thinking Together‘ website. Share the cue cards with the students via Google Drive a few days in advance so that they can become familiar with them. In the discussion class, print five sets of the cue cards, put the students in mixed groups, and give each group a set of cards.

1. Groups distribute cards among members
2. (5-10 minutes) Students gather their thoughts and review their notes on the adaptations of the play (I had not planned for this, but it quickly became evident that it was necessary).
3. (15 minutes) Students discuss using the cards without their computers. Teacher goes around the room to support discussions.
4. (15 minutes) Students continue discussion, but begin taking notes in a Google Document that is shared with the whole class, with a table section for each group to use. There are a few advantages to using a Google Doc:
   1. While students are completing their shared notes, the teacher can review the document and add questions to facilitate further discussion and address any common misunderstandings that emerge: without interrupting discussions!
   2. Students can see what other groups are coming up with
   3. Students will have access to the notes for review when they are preparing their for their summative task.

Ranking: This activity was very powerful as it provided excellent structure for discussion

Chelsea's Post

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Best For: Grade 1 - 10

Description: Padlet allows students to collaborate online using one platform. Students can record their thinking by writing or recording themselves, they can link website and upload files. Students are able to comment on each others notes and can be used on a range of devices. This allows collaboration from school, home and can be used to connect with other schools.

Ranking: Padlet is an easy way for teachers to see students oral responses, thought process and levels of collaboration. It can be used at a range of different levels and in all subject area. 

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Best For: Phase 1 & 2, PYP

Description: This activity can work well in terms of students learning new words from their reading, and then taking those new words and piecing them together in new sentences, etc. This would be especially powerful for new language learners.
Simon Templeton describes how it has worked with a student he has, see here: Simon's Post.

Ranking: This possibly deserves more stars, but is not an activity you can use often. Time consuming and really for our Phase 1 and 2 students. Still, can be worthwhile.

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Best For: All

Description: This idea (and photo) comes from Ben Wiggins (2016), and he gathered some of these strategies from Gibbons (2009). The overall focus is to basically make rich tasks and include our language learners in these from the beginning with support as needed. By giving students roles within these tasks, and then supporting them with the language needed to fulfill their role in an apprenticeship type task (such as coaching) then they will be able to develop the language more quickly. Bottom line is that to treat the students at their academic potential, not by their deficiently in English (Gibbons, 2009).

Ranking: Most of the PYP and MYP is geared around these types of tasks, the key is to actually give our EL Learners bigger roles within these and support them as needed.

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Best For: All Grades

Description: For my last unit of inquiry I took a different slant on the traditional word wall and asked students to find the unit words in their mother tongue as well as a picture that best represented the word to them. With all this information we created a word wall. A word wall is generally in a highly visible location so students have easy access to the words, it is interactive and designed so the students can use them to help with their writing and reading. For more information on word walls see here.

Ranking: I gave this strategy three stars as I don't feel it was independently used by the students as much as I would have liked. Getting the students to translate the words from English to their Mother Tongue was valuable and finding a picture also helped develop students understanding of the words. Throughout the unit I needed to remind students to refer to the wall when they were trying to spell a word. I would have liked to have seen more independence from the students in using the word wall. I also feel it is important that the students are involved in the creation of the wall to enable them to have ownership over the wall and so it has meaning to them.

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Best For: Grades 2 and up

Description: Numbered Heads Together is a cooperative learning strategy designed to promote discussion and accountability for all group members. You can read more on the strategy here. I did this activity when the EAL teacher was in the classroom and we were able to better facilitate the students together. At the start of the lesson the students were placed into groups of four. Each group member received a number from 1 - 4. We posed a question about our current unit of inquiry to the students and as a group they discussed the question and came up with an answer. After 3-5 minutes of discussion we stopped the students and called out a number between 1-4. The students with that number stood up, this meant that there was one student from each group standing. This student then had to share their groups answer with the class. This was repeated a number of times with different questions.

Ranking: I found this to be a valuable lesson and all the students were engaged and able to follow the instructions. I gave it four stars not five as I feel for the younger grade levels setting this up with only one teacher would require a lot of time and some students may find it difficult to found the directions.

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Best For: Phase 2 +

Description: This is an activity where students are asked to delve a bit deeper into the meaning of new vocabulary. As well as the usual image and definition students are used to finding in vocabulary activities, they are asked to categorise the word in terms of parts of speech, give an example sentence to show they can use the word in context and look for base words and word families. This activity has been adapted from the word study approach to spelling.

These were the instructions given to students

Each student will explain two words to the class.

• Teach the class how to say (pronounce) the word correctly
• Find a picture
• Categorise the word (is it a noun, verb, adjective?)
• Write a definition
• Write the word in a sentence

• List any related words

Ranking: I like this activity because students are forced to *understand* the word, not just copy a definition from the internet that they may or may not understand. They also start to think about the different categories of words and how they are used. They can play around with words adding pre-fixes and suffixes, seeing if they can turn the word into an adjective, verb etc.

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Best For: Phase 3+ and Grade 5+

Description: WriteWell is an app that helps students write in chunks. Now this app could be used by all students, but may be extra helpful to our emerging language learners, as the teacher could use this to help them chunk their writing into meaningful paragraphs. Watch this video:

Ranking: This app gets a five star because it is easy to use add-on to enhance writing. I put for Phase 3+ and grade 5+, as they would be doing longer pieces of writing at this point, where they would be more focusing on chunking their writing in this way.

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Best For: Any grade

Description: This strategy is for learning and teaching a concept/word. In groups, students are given a word that they have to teach the rest of the class through a skit.

Ranking: Some students have a lot of fun with this while others are more hesitant. In order to make a skit, students need to have a good understanding of the word/concept and think about how they can best communicate this through words and actions. This tends to be a memorable exercise and one that you can relate back to when the word comes up in the future.

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Best For: All Grade levels

Description: Think pair share is a well known collaborative learning strategy. This strategy promotes individual thinking, collaboration and speaking. The first step of this strategy requires the teacher to poise a question or statement to the students. The students then think individually about the question or statement and come up with their own answer.  In my case the students were asked what they believe is needed in an city. The next step is for students to pair up with one other person and share their answers together.

Teachers can then ask students to share with the whole class or pair up with a different partner. In my example this was an excellent strategy to encourage all students to share their ideas in a small group.

Ranking: I gave this strategy 5 stars as it is a well know strategy, easy to use and adaptable to all age groups. It can easily be extended and adapted to suit the needs of the class and individual students. 

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Best For: Phase 1+

Description: Kahoot is a great online tool to revise vocabulary. Teachers can create quizzes for students to complete or get the students to make their own. This is a great way to end a lesson (10-15mins depending on the amount of questions). The teacher controls the quiz from their computer and projects it onto the board. Each student logs in on their individual computer/ipad/phone (or in groups) with the game pin. Students are given points for correct answers and a ranking of the students who got the correct answer the fastest is shown after each question. This activity is great as it provides the teacher with a breakdown of what percentage of the class got the question right instantly. This means that concepts that the students are unclear about can be discussed on the spot. The teacher can also look at the statistics after class and see exactly which students got questions incorrect and what their responses were.

Ranking: I give this activity 5 out of 5 stars for student engagement as well providing direct feedback to the teacher.

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Best For: Phase 2+

Description: This activity works well after the class has competed a jigsaw type activity such as TDIOE. My students each completed the table for two words. They then took on responsibility for one word each. Students were given numbers 1 and 2. Numbers twos were asked to come and make a circle up the front bringing their vocabulary flashcard (see mix and match). Numbers ones were asked to come and make another smaller circle each facing a number two student. Students were given one minute (30 seconds each) to explain their word to their partner and ask questions to clarify. After one minute the outside circle rotated one place to the right and the activity was repeated. After three rotations I explained that this time the students were going to swap words at the end of the minute so they needed to ensure that they really understood what was being explained to them. We continues the activity swapping words every time until we had complete a full circle.

Ranking: This is a quick and efficient way for students to be exposed to a lot of new vocabulary. By having to explain it themselves they had to take on responsibility for ensuring they knew what the word meant. Swapping the words later in the activity meant that students had to listen actively and ask questions if the explanation wasn't clear.

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Best For: Phase 1+ Any Grade Level

Description: This is a quick and fun activity to start a lesson focusing on pre-teaching vocabulary. It does take a bit of preparation but the flashcards can be re-used for other activities or displayed on the wall. The teacher needs to make and print flash cards with the target vocabulary. One card with the word and one with a matching picture. Each student is given a card at random and then asked to find their partner. Students move around the classroom looking at each other's cards and trying to find the picture or word that matches theirs. Once they have think they have found their partner they check with the teacher. Once competed the teacher may collect the cards and redistribute and repeat the activity 2-3 times. Once the activity was complete I asked the students to sit with their new partner and we moved on to another activity called TDIOE. Each pair was responsible for completing two words int he shared document.

Ranking: I gave this activity 4/5 stars because it does take a lot of preparation time compared to the time it takes to complete the activity. The students were engaged, moving and around and discussing their interpretation of the pictures with their fellow students. A good activity to start a new unit.

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Best For: Grades 2 and above
Description:
This activity was under taken in stages.
Stage 1 Two classes of Grade 3's used visual images from the unit of inquiry to create questions. The questions were created via a 'bus stop' session where the students walked around sharing their questions. EAL's were supported to write questions with scaffolds of sentence starters that included the starting words What, Why, How etc
The questions were reviewed and discussed by the classes.
Stage 2 The third Grade 3 class took the questions the other classes had created. They read them and decided that many of the questions were 'thin' questions and not the sort of questions that would help you inquiry deeply into something or research an idea. They then took the questions and created 'thick' research questions. They worked in pairs and discussed ideas together. EAL students were grouped with students who could model what was needed and could help guide them.
Once they had suggestions for deep thick questions the groups orally presented their ideas to the class. As a whole the class they chose the most effective question for each image. Discussions were had about what made the questions effective or not. All members of the group shared their ideas for questions.
Stage 3 The questions the students had created were used in collaboration with the librarian to research using key words for all Grade 3 students.

Ranking: 5 stars. This modelled visible thinking, developed questioning skills, modelled collaboration, scaffolded learning and made authentic integrations with technology and research skills.

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Best for Upper PYP and Lower MYP (Phase 2+)

Description: Talking points, structuring meaningful discussions - This idea stemmed from how much of learning happens through students talking. And with our Language Learners often needing more support in being part of those conversations. But teaching students to have discussions with real purpose is not always as easy as we might think it is. This first resource might be better for upper PYP students, to help teach and scaffold language in general, there is a rubric that goes with it. The rubric itself could be used for older students as well. The key here is to teach how to have a conversation, and then to have this in small groups, without roles! and help each student engage. I did this in groups of 3, and didn't use their specific talking points but geared it more around our topic, but let them know what I was looking for. I then gave prompting powerful questions to keep them thinking. Most importantly, the Language Learners were in small groups, and others were instructed to engage them with questions like: "What do you think?" Some repeated what they had heard, but others surprised us with knowledge that they knew that may not have been shared if not in this type of setting.

Ranking: Very successful, and teaching this oracy skills is so important. To improve this, especially if in a classroom and not outside or in the gym, I might add in the academic language and even scaffold sentence starters for students more to help them be even more successful. Probably a 4-star for upper PYP and lower MYP depending upon situation, but structuring this is useful for all!

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Best For: Phase 1+ Any Grade Level

Description: This is a standard Gini technique where students could work together or individually to create this doc with the Tier 3 (specific to this unit) vocabulary. This really helps students take the vocabulary and create context for themselves (Mother Tongue and own example and image) to understand the words.

Ranking: This only gets 3 stars, because it is a written (typing) one, and we are looking for non-written practices. It is good for understanding and helping students understand, and going back to this and making and practicing flashcards with different games from this is a quite good idea.