Skip to main content

ESL Ruminations #3

OK. I'm on a roll. I have been energized by thinking and writing about what's working and what isn't going so well with my ESL classes. I have enjoyed trying out new routines and activities with my students. I've written about some of my ruminations and attempts to improve learning for my students here and here.

Today I want to share about an old but new-to-my-students activity: collaborative story writing.

My instructions were simple: start a story and pass your paper to the person on your right so they can continue it. We talked about making sure that there was a beginning, middle and end, and that the middle involved the problem and the solution. We talked about setting and characters and that ample details make a story more interesting. We talked about the importance of each subsequent section fitting in with the previous sections. In other words, the story had to make sense. We talked about printing legibly so that their group members would be able to read their writing.

I had two different groups engage in this activity. One group was composed of eight children in fourth and fifth grades, and the second group (two different classes) only had 3 students all of whom are in the sixth grade. The smaller group completed four rounds of exchanging papers and finished their stories. The larger group had a later start, more questions about the process, and was not able to exchange papers. They did, however, write the beginning of their stories and shared these orally with each other. All of the students in both groups are beginner ESL students.

As a result of these two experiences, I have decided to divide the larger group into two smaller groups. This will allow them to finish their stories in one sitting and hopefully result in fewer distractions.

I'm thinking that the next step will be to have students pair up to revise and edit their stories. They could also add illustrations and come up with a suitable title for their stories. We could publish them and share them with other classes, families, and friends.

Here's a variation of the collaborative story writing we did yesterday.

Have you done anything similar to this with your students? How did it go? Any suggestions for improving this process with ESL students? Please share in the comments section below.

Cross posted to http://twowritingteachers.wordpress.com/2013/06/04/writerwithabigw/

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Partner Reading and Content, Too Routine (PRC2)

I'm a hoarder. There, I've said it. I try to deny that I'm a hoarder but it comes back to haunt me every time I move houses, or pack up my classroom at the end of the school year. I have old articles, lesson plans, handouts, folders brimming with teaching ideas, past issues of profesional journals. I hardly throw anything out though I've learned to be more selective over the years. My one rule of thumb, and I really try to stick to this, is that if I haven't used or referred to something in a year, then it's time to toss it into the recycle bin. One exception to this rule (you knew this was coming, didn't you?) is past issues of journals from professional organizations. However, with the ability to locate articles online through my professional memberships, even this exception is becoming less and less useful, which brings me to the topic of this blog post. I am currently reading a copy of The Reading Teacher from 2010. I've clipped a cou...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Reading Strategies Book - Chapter 12, Supporting Students’ Conversations – Speaking, Listening, and Deepening Comprehension

The strategy lessons highlighted in Chapter 12, Supporting Students’ Conversations – Speaking, Listening, and Deepening Comprehension, in The Reading Strategies Book by Jennifer Serravallo are critical to students’ engagement and comprehension, as well as their ability to write literary essays, or even book reviews, summaries and reflective pieces about books. If students aren’t able to talk about books in a way that is invigorating and joyful, they will be less likely to develop an interest in growing ideas for writing about books. In her introduction to this chapter, Jennifer Serravallo, reminds us that when conversations go well, children are inspired by what they read and are motivated to keep reading. However, when conversations fall flat, then kids get bored and tune out. How do we avoid this situation and teach kids to  have  focused conversations about books?  The answer is easy: teach kids  strategies to help them develop effective conversa...
Post a Comment
Read more

Are we listening?

A child sits alone with a ripped worksheet packet on his desk. He appears to be singing or subvocalizing something though no one hears him. Or, perhaps they're ignoring him. The teacher stands at the front of the room teaching on the SmartBoard. The children follow along in their worksheets. Except the child sitting alone. He is in his own world. No one engages him and he engages no one. My heart aches for this child. He is physically and emotionally removed from the class. I ask him why his paper is ripped. (It's not an accidental rip.) He says he did that on a different day. When he had been frustrated about the work. He tells me that he sometimes sits by himself because the work is too hard for him. He later tells me that he sits by himself because the teacher thinks he talks too much during the lesson.  He says he does that because he wants to find out about the "lives of the other children". My first impulse is to rescue him from the wrongheade...
10 comments
Read more