✰✰✰✰


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.

✰✰✰

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.

✰✰✰✰

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.

✰✰✰✰

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.

✰✰✰✰✰ (out of 5 stars)

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.

✰✰✰✰

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.

✰✰✰✰✰

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.