Week 16: Sharing Day

It was great seeing everyone's projects this week and seeing how much work everyone put into their activities! After I finish grading them, I will be sure to get everyone a copy of these useful resources.  Next week's class will be the last day of Approaches class.  But don't be too sad, we will still see each other in Management!  Good job everyone!

Week 15: Stretching Children's Competence

We are really getting down to the last weeks of the program!  This was actually our last regular lesson for Approaches.  We will only have two more weeks in this course together after this.

This lesson was about designing activities that push our students to new levels.  We do this by thinking about what they can do (which we know from observation, of course) and designing tasks that are just beyond that.  To ensure that they can complete the activities, we provide different kinds of support to help them through to the end.  

The lesson this week was great practice for Project 2, which you will bring to class next week.  We will spend the whole class next week sharing our projects with each other, so it's important that you bring your assignment to contribute.  I will collect them when we finish sharing. I'm so excited to see the interesting and original activities that you come up with!

One more note: Please include the rubric with your project.  It really helps me :)

Week 14: To the Moon!

This week in class, we had a little bit of a review activity about what we have been covering for the past few weeks.  While going to the moon may not be a possible real world experience for our students right now, taking on the role of astronauts is as close as we can get.  Although we didn't really go to the moon, hopefully it was an engaging experience all the same.

Although I didn't assign it yet, I announced that Project 2 will be due in a couple of weeks.  Everyone needs to come up with an original activity to share with the class. You cannot reuse any of the activities that you have already shared with the class in another course.  Please use this template to make things easier for you. It has the rubric attached so you can just print that along with it for me!  I will explain more about the assignment in next week's class.  For now, you all have too many other things to focus on!

Here is an example of a completed assignment that earned a "C".  This is a BAD example! DON'T DO IT THIS WAY!  To get a better grade, add more detail to the descriptions of the activity and scaffolding and make stronger connections to the course concepts. I would show you better examples, but sometimes the good examples influence your projects too much.  I want to see what you can do with what you learned!

Week 13: Real World Experiences and Halloween!

I hope everyone had fun last week with the Halloween party and the real world experiences lesson.  I'm being told repeatedly that it was our best event ever!  While I realize it was a lot of work, it gave us all a chance to think about what types of things we can teach children by giving them this kind of experience.

Week 11: Challenge Children with Higher Order Thinking

This week, we will discuss higher order thinking.   Please look at these two sets of readings, and then watch the videos below. This topic may be a little challenging at first, so please ask me if you have questions!

• Griney Groller Test
• Higher Order Verbs, Questions, and Activities

CLASS ACTIVITIES

Here are the activities we look at in class. One set is for travel/transportation, the other set is for astronauts and space. Below, there are two versions. The first version are the original activities from a 1st language classroom. The second set has been adapted to that they can be used in an EFL classroom (the activities have been rephrased or replaced so that they can be used to practice particular grammar structures in a more predictable way).

Higher Order Thinking Activities – Original L1 Activities
Higher Order Thinking Activities – Adapted for EFL

Week 10: "It's Fun" is Not Enough

This week in class we clarified, connected, and deepened our knowledge about supporting and challenging students.

As we discussed before, activities need to be developmentally appropriate for our students.   This week, I show you some activities that are appropriate for kindergarten, lower-elementary, and upper-elementary students.   Here are the activity sheets that we used in this week’s class.

• “Fun is Not Enough” Activity Packet
• “We Need Light to See”

Once we have chosen appropriate activities (based on the skills, concepts, or attitudes that you want to teach), now we need to plan our scaffolding.   Here are two important concepts to consider:

1. Scaffolding needs to fit your students’ development.
2. Your scaffolding needs to lead toward the skills, concepts, or attitudes that you are trying to teach.

Lastly, we discussed 3 specific scaffolding strategies:  verbal scaffolding, instructional scaffolding, and procedural scaffolding.   Look for examples in your classes!

Week 9: Sharing Day

In our class this week, we took a look at all the things we've learned so far and how meaningful it was for all of us.  Your homework for midterm is to complete the special reflection described in the agenda.  It should only be about one or two paragraphs long.  All instructors will read it and it will be returned to you after that.  It's not graded, so don't worry too much about it being perfect. We just want to hear your thoughts and experiences.

The reflection must be turned in by Friday, October 11th in the pockets next to my office door.  I look forward to reading it!