Data-fying langauge spin-out

Working with students learning English is a great kind of work for me. I enjoy people and like sharing my love of learning about the natural world and the world of language and song. My classroom is not a beautifully organized Pinterest space.

 Since I graduated from college with a BA in Education in 1983, I have worked with people learning English. I started in a summer school and worked teaching Math to English language learning middle schoolers. They were the sons and daughters of Mexican migrant farm workers. I did not have any experience teaching, but I could communicate in Spanish about adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. I feel like I blocked out the memory of how poorly I was prepared. I also blocked out any memories of classroom management failings. I do remember I taught the standard algorithm with very little concept development. It wasn't until ten years later, after a course in Visual Mathematics, that I understood the concept of two negatives make a positive. I memorized the statement as fact and taught it that way to that first group of kids.

Every year I learn from students what it is that I need to teach them. Now, a lot of what I need to teach them has had to be data-fied. I hear the first grade English Langauge Learner (ELL) say, "Him run to school". I understand her intent, so I know she isn't stuck in the Silent Period when she doesn't know enough English to say her own thoughts, and I know she needs to get some miles on her tongue saying, "He runs to school." I say, "Yes! He runs to school. Say it with me. He runs to school." The student repeats. If she is with other students that might need this practice I'll enlist the help of the others and make it more like a chant-on-the-fly. "He runs to school in the morning, he runs to school at night, he runs to school in the afternoon, he runs with all his might." Data-fying her original sentence means scoring it to begin finding out if the instruction is effective. Unfortunately, to see if instruction is effective it needs to be compared with the other first grade students learning that same lesson, hence a speaking task for all first grade ELL students at her level. I need a picture of the boy running to school. No, I need a whole series of pictures of different people running to different places. I will enlist help creating pictures. Other verbs riding, driving, skipping, walking, rolling, jumping, skating, skiing might make for some funny images. I see a series of art lessons culminating in a class made flip book.

At home for the holidays. I am feeling blessed to have friends to play music with and that the sun is shining and I am not just socked in with grey clouds.

I have some homework (reading and highlighting, no long essays) as our district is looking at renovating the ESL materials. In this era of Common Core Standards I find that my job is changing. Not that it hasn't changed every year since I started, but now I feel I find myself trying to navigate how the English Language is used effectively in the regular ed classroom and how to support language learners and their teachers.

The classes that Stanford offers through the MOOC (massive open online course) that focus on English Language Learners are time consuming and full of ideas and high expectations. I am mulling over the idea of taking the next one that is six months long instead of three. I was team lead on one last spring and it was a great experience. I joined one this fall that had no team lead ( It hought it did, but no one communcated ) and it was not a great experience. It was a lot of work to do the team lead, but I feel it was worth it.

I'm a Blogger-not

I really thought that I would get better at narrating some of the more interesting things that I do, but I have not taken the time to do it. When I am online I tend to check email and trash most of it, check Facebook and reply to any posts that I like. I have been a member of Twitter a long time, but never really tweet anymore. I joined Instagram a couple of days ago to make posting pictures easy.

Last summer I got to play with some mummers and puppeteers called Risk of Change for the Oregon Country Fair. My friend Jenni invited me and we ended up making a twins costume so that we could be the Silver Lining Sisters. We had clear glass orbs (otherwise known as marbles) and we would hand one to a fair-goer and tell them something like "This is an orb of perception that will help you look into yourself to find the silver lining in all your life's challenges." We also dressed up as gnomes, trolls, curly-stripey clowns, carnaval clowns, flamingo-rinas and some color themed costumes. This year uncle Sam thwarted my ability to go play by demanding more than a thousand dollars on April 15th, so I taught summer school again. I am hoping to return next summer.

I am going to clean out my car so that I can drive it south for 12 hours or so and camp in the redwoods near the Russian River and play music from Brazil at California Brazil Camp. I have been going for 7 or 8 years and learning songs and a third language and culture. It looks like I might be trecking alone, so I am preparing myself for that possibility. Snacks, music and a good night's sleep and I'll be ready.

QuadBlogging Connects Student Writers with Global Audiences | Edutopia

QuadBlogging Connects Student Writers with Global Audiences | Edutopia

Hmm. I wonder if it is time to Blog with the writers at Parkdale Elementary school.

This summer we hosted six people from the Czech Republic for a couple of days. They found their way to Timberline, Laurence Lake and Tamawanas Falls for local hiking before venturing up to Washington and across to Montana and then back down to California and home. I love Couchsurfing.org.

I am thinking about music a lot. I have always sung. The first recording that I made was when I was in kindergarten at Castle School and my mom rewrote the words to "Wouldn't It Be Loverly?" from the musical ___. We did a play and I played a cat and sang about wanting tuna and milk and "Meow... wouldn't it be loverly?" But that isn't the thing I was thinking about when I started this blog entry.

Lately I have been stretching my mind to learn more music theory because I am in a teacher certification program for ukulele teachers taught by James Hill. I never took a music theory class in school. I sang in choir in high school and in the vocal jazz ensemble in college and was familiar with the idea of intervals but never had to label them or teach them. Now I am learning them so that I can teach them to my second year students that are playing ukulele.

I was searching around on the Ukulele in the Classroom site and found a thread that lead me to The Musical Intervals Tutor. I like how it lists songs that many people are familiar with so that you can imagine the different interval in your "minds ear" before you listen to it. This song starts with a major third. What would it sound like with a minor third instead? This video was done on a FlipVideo last summer near Banyuls Sur Mer in the south of France when James and I couchsurfed with Leonardo.

He took us up to the view between towns. I have a memory blog about our whole couch surfing experience started. I lost my muse when I deleted the notes (note) I was taking on my iPad on the flight home. I am only now beginning to retrace our footsteps.

Back to playing.

I teach ukulele after school to fourth and fifth graders. On Valentine's Day, I think an hour after school is too long! They all needed to take a break in the middle and go get drinks, partly because of the candy they consumed and partly because their fingers were tired from a new strum that I taught them. I think it might be considered a folk strum. The best part of the group was when individuals played the C scale that they have been practicing.

I tune the instruments before they come in, but last week I changed the strings on four of them and they have to be tuned again after about 15 minutes. Well after fifteen minutes I start to hear that they are too far out of tune to sound good they probably are stretching after five minutes. If you have any tricks for getting nylon strings to settle in, let me know.

This is a picture of me from last summer in Geißen, Germany. A two year old took the picture of me holding the guitar that I had just tuned.

First Grade

I have the old Quasar VHR camera in my room. It only works plugged in, but the first graders love it. I use it to record their reader's theater so that they could hear and see themselves. Every group I have is intrigued by the camera, so I have incorporated a bit of movie making into the end of the year activities, but am thinking that it is so motivating that we should start the process earlier.

 I use hard copy story boards for the "shot" and the basic lines spoken, and then teach the camera experts how to zoom in and zoom out, start and stop recording, and how to operate the tripod.

The end of the year fifth grade group is gathering "Favorite Memory" stories for the promotion party this Friday. They will be dropping video clips into Movie Maker, and adding some music as background. We had one digital video camera that makes little Quick Time movies that had to be converted, so we used a You Tube converter program and changed them all to .avi so that the Movie Maker could see them.  If I had parental rights signed, I'd post it at the end, but I don't and I don't think I will get them before Friday.

I found a 1978 SCDC Spanish Curricula Units box that was going to be thrown away. I am always looking for "new" materials and so I opened the teachers edition up and found page 145 where it said to write palo, miel, cama, mesa, nube and the read:

Había una vez un viejo malo/ que andaba con un _________.
Tengo un amigo fiel/ tan bueno como la ________.
Toñito tiene fama/ de saltar en la _________.
Es tanto lo que pesa/ que se rompió la ___________.
Tan alto Nino sube/ que se sente una _________.

Along with talking about using a franelógrafo which is what the authors called the flannel board (for you young people, teachers used to stick pictures made of flannel on a board made of flannel to tell stories) I found a worksheet to mimeograph that had the following word match:
rica  boca
toca  beso
pide pica
mesa  jugo
Hugo  mide

I thumbed through it and the pages were falling out at the spine. It included the pictures what are part of a series of books that were in another box that was/is going to be thrown away. I can't let it go just yet. There are kids in my class room that don't have books at home, and though they are dated, they are easy to read. I had to laugh at the title of one of the stories Pollito Pito, because of the double meaning of pito in Spanish. I don't think I'll send that book home.

I am going to look into see if this series has been updated to include newer pictures and stories.

Tech ideas for my grade level groups

Since I work with kids at all six levels at our elementary school I am going to overview what technology I see kids using at my little school on a regular basis.

In kindergarten the kids all have a chance to do a program called Zip Zoom. It is meant to be comprehensible English for students that don't speak English at home, but most all the kids play it because they learn mousing skills and onset vowel sounds.

 Last year my kindergarten group of 7 kids made an ABC book in MSWord, copying and pasting pictures from a bank that I created. I actually had them print the pictures and  paste them into a cardboard blank book to take home and keep. They used Photo Story to recreate the book and record their voices.

This year the schedule was different and i didn't have one single group that came to me daily, I had groups of five - seven kids that came to me on a rotation.The "conversation" group mostly uses realia to prompt speaking in complete sentences. Sometimes they can take turns on an iPad I bought that has a couple of programs from Montessori that teach letter sounds and how to form them and number sense games. I also got some of the Smart Baby programs that have flash cards to learn vocabulary. As squirmy as they often are, they can generally focus on what the other students are doing on the iPad when it is not their turn. It is pretty motivating. I hope we can get a couple more.

Tabajando con palabras

Near the beginning of the year we started rotations with students learning to read and write in Spanish. I have paper letter tiles and plastic "benches" to sit them on and I have the students build words. Here are some of the sequences I used. Sometimes I ask them what I have to do to change the word on the bench to the next word, and sometimes I tell them what to change.

Here is a shortened version of the directions. Use the first line as the example: Escriban la palabra mi, como en la oración Es mi perro. Mi. Ahora, quiero que quite el vocal y cámbialo al vocal "e". ¿Qué palabra es? Me. Sí! Cambia la primera letra, el consonante a un "t". ¿Qué palabra es? Te. Sí!  Ahora, quite el vocal y cámbialo al vocal "i" . ¿Qué palabra es? Ahora deja ti al lado izquierdo. Escriba la sílaba "to" al lado derecha. Juntalas dos partes, ¿Qué palabra es? tito? Es un nombre de alguien. Debe voltear la "t" para que sea mayúscula. ¿Qué nombre tenemos si cambia el "i" a "o"? Toto, muy bien. ¿Qué palabra tendrías si pongas un "n" entre las dos sílabas? tonto. Sí. ¿Y si cambia los vocales a "a"? tanta. Cambia la primera "a" a "o". Cambia la "o" a "i".

I find that I can see which students have difficulty or are very quick with left /right, first/last, vowel&consonant (they are different colors so that helps), tracking left to right, sound/letter names. In the lowest level learners, I take away the letters all together and just work on hearing the sounds in words.

mi-me-te-ti-to-Tito-Toto-tonto-tanta-tonta-tinta-pinta-cinta-quinto-pinta-pintura-cintura-cura-curita
puma-espuma-pluma
Toto-tonto-tono-mono-monto-moto-foto-roto-Rita-quita-queso-quepo
va-chiva-chivo-chivos
va-chiva-viva-vida-visa
va-chiva-Chava-ccharla-ala-sala-alas-sala-sola-ola-olla-silla
cosa-rosa-risa-pisa-tisa-masa-mapa
su-tu-tus-tio-tios-tias-mias-misa-tisa-risa-sonrisa
oruga-tortuga-corre-torre-toro-topo-topa-ropa-sopa-sola-bola-hola-halo-hallo
pin-sin-cine-cisne-tina-pina-espina
pato-Pati-pato-zapato
frente-gente-siente-diente
blusa-bloco-loco-toco-toca-troca-roca-ronca
martillo-anillo-zorrillo-zorro-porra-mora
tio-frio-fria-fruto-fruta-frente-mente
roca-troca-truco-trozo-trampa-trompeta
tía- fría-frío-tío-amarillo-martillo

I am at elementary school so the topics that this site offered were just a little too mature for my little ones, but I liked a lot of them and had I been working with 11-13 year olds I would have been able to foster some great conversations and writing: http://www.tweentribune.com/content/tweentribune-classroom

When I did teach that age group, I predominately used movies, first my favorite legends and fairy tails, then movies on the topics that they were studying in their regular education classrooms, grade level curriculum. I would pre-teach some of the vocabulary that they would need, and we would stop the movie to check for understanding. Students would do their best to summarize and at first, I had to do a lot of think aloud and write as I spoke, adding the most important or enduring vocabulary. Then I would make a "cloze passage" removing every fifth or sixth word. I would list the missing words at the bottom of the page and they were expected to write the word in their native language (mostly Spanish speakers where I am and one Chinese family that would have to check that themselves, because I don't know Chinese, yet).
We used the same piece of writing to practice speaking and I would teach how a sentence can be made into a number of different questions.

Why did I do that? Because I couldn't find materials 20 years ago that appealed to that age group! They loved playing pictionary and hang-man with the vocabulary. Come to think of it, that was really fun. My older kids might like to do that.

Tuner for the guitar

www.howtotuneaguitar.org

second grade transition and kindergarten phonemic game

At the beginning of January I started to transition the dozen or so kids that are still reading the Houghton Mifflin Lectura series in Spanish into English. We started with the Visualizing and Verbalizing structure words that we had been doing for writing and I modeled the English every other day. Then at the end of January, at the beginning of the second semester, I quit the daily writing. Now we read the story from the basal in Spanish and discuss the meaning of words and follow the questioning strategies that are in the teacher's manual and that's pretty much all the Spanish they will get until we have read the story twice and I ask them to write a journal entry about the story or something the story made them think about.

Then the other half of their time we are reading English from the Early Success series. I chose the first level so that they could hear the rhythm and rhyme. On Fridays and Mondays all year, they have been doing Zip Zoom and have "graduated" to RAZ kids. Most of the kids have finished level 3 of Zip Zoom by second grade and are ready. I feel pressured to exit kids from Spanish if they can read and understand well so that they can get started with the dominant culture's language. What I find is that the students that aren't exited are often the ones that have some kind of learning issue. They don't hear all the sounds in Spanish (L1=first language) which is completely phonetic, and then they end up struggling in English (L2=second language) too, because they don't hear all the sounds in this language, either.

For intervention for the kindergarteners, (groups of five or six) I have adopted the practice of using little plastic toys that they name. I use about a dozen items that sit on the desk in front of me. I have plastic tiles that I touch (kids are facing me, so I go right to left) as I say the sounds in the words. In the beginning after I say all the sounds, if I don't get any response as to which item I might have said, I go back and group the tiles in the syllables. I have tried a number of different ways to respond and I like to switch it up. The first time I did it, I allowed the students that thought they knew to say it. Then I started handing out the plastic toys and if they had two toys they couldn't say the word anymore. For a couple of weeks now, I have been trying another response so that they don't just "shout out" the answer, I have them listen to the sounds and put their thumbs up if they think they know the word, I count to three and they say the word in a chorus. I see who is leading and following. It is the same kids that didn't get two toys right away. The game is that with five year olds, someone always forgets and blurts out the answer, so I put the toy back in the bucket for "me" and if no one shouts out, "they" get the toys in front of them.

If you read this and you think you would try something that has worked for me, please write me a message. I am fairly certain, I am mostly writing this to myself and processing what I have done that seems to be fun and working too.

http://ksquirkyteacher.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/tips-from-the-super-organized/

Visualizing and Verbalizing-Nanci Bell

I have been adapting a technique from the book Visualizing and Verbalizing by Nanci Bell to improve writing in my Spanish lit group. In a nutshell, Nanci presents one method so that students are able to use their mind's eye to visualize and their oral vocabulary to talk about the gestalt, or main idea, of a topic. It starts out using basic pictures that progressively get more detailed, then moves through imaging words, single sentences, various sentences, paragraphs and pages. I work with eight year olds and after one quarter we continue to work with the pictures and begin imaging words.

Her method uses twelve structure words that students learn so that they can be more precise in their overall understanding. I have translated them into Spanish: what=qué, size=tamaño, color=color, number=número, shape=forma, where=dónde, movement=movimiento, mood=humor o sentimiento, background=fondo, perspective=perspectivo, when=cuándo, and sound=sonido.

I use the simple pictures to introduce how to talk about nouns using the structure words. (I don't introduce perspective and movement in the beginning.) I ask the class to discuss at their table groups how they would talk about the size (and then other structure words) and give about a minute for them to come up with an idea. I have made it my mission to be aware of which students are doing most of the talking at their table groups and I ask the ones who did less talking to report to me what their table group came up with. When I am first introducing this I write their main ideas on the board, but I phase that out so that I can beging to see which students can write accurately, independently. After we have discussed the topic of the day (the picture) I set a time for 8 minutes. When the timer goes off, I ask them to read what they wrote and listen to see if it makes sense. I will often quote a workshop presentor, Ms. Barnaby, and say, "Revise with your ears, and edit with your eyes." I have to explain that to them more than once.

The two pictures are the same student's writing about one month apart. I see similar results in volume of writing from the majority of my group. The first picture shows that she ran out of ideas and had time to draw a picture of the cupcake (pastel). The second picture is about a month later after writing daily. She was able to continue to write for the entire time on the topic of elephant (elefante). This student does not write consonant blends independently, but she has improved in how much she can stay on task when asked to write about a topic.

Lego Robotics FLL competition

Today the fourth and fifth graders had their first experience with competing in the Body Forward missions. My first year as coach. 8/9 rookies. Here are a few things that I learned.

*Bring extra food
*Do at least two team building activities ahead of time
*Have a group do research for the project
*Practice exact placing of the robots in home base quickly

In the missions, we got the second highest score of the day and that was the highest in that round. That was one quarter of the total score. I thought they were awesome and I'll post pictures as soon as some parents get them to me. My camera battery died. Oh,

*charge the batteries in all technology, not just the robots and the laptops.

Science Links

Science
http://www.sciencebob.com/index.php
ideas for science fair projects
http://www.rense.com/general72/size.htm
The size of our world
http://activities.macmillanmh.com/science/ca

http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/

http://www.fossweb.com

simple machines
Planet Science
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/photomicrography/
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/photomicrography/
http://serc.carleton.edu/sp/library/google_earth/index.html

http://www.pbs.org/teachers/webinar/archive.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2009/jul/21/china-india
path of the moon in solar eclipse 7/22/09
http://www.hunkinsexperiments.com/
cartoon experiments

http://www.aip.de/groups/galaxies/sw/udf/swudfV1.0.html
night eye sky telescope vision

http://www.windows.ucar.edu/
Windows to the Universe

http://www.legoeducation.com/forms/activitycontest.asp

http://ted.coe.wayne.edu/sse/wq/nick/claymation.htm
claymation

http://fossweb.com/

http://www.eskeletons.org/

http://www.ithaca.edu/looksharp/
kindergarten health lesson

http://www.cellsalive.com/

ESL/ language learning links

http://www.123listening.com/
listening vocabulary
http://www.eslcafe.com/idea/index.cgi?Games
Dave's ESL Cafe has his list of great games to play
http://www.iteachilearn.com/cummins/
http://www.ohio.edu/linguistics/esl/
make a picture dictionary
English Trailers
Tapestry for Teachers of English Language Learners

http://www.literacycenter.net/
pre K counting, alphabet in four languages.
http://reading.ecb.org

http://teacher.scholastic.com/writewit/index.htm

http://www.speakaboos.com

http://www.soundguideweb.com/soundguide/?lang=en
Great Britain video clips dialog written
learn about news
http://www.listen-and-write.com/audio
dictation practice
http://www.eslholidaylessons.com/10/international_day_of_non-violence.html
http://www.mingoville.com/en.html
Larry Fazzio's top choice for 2008
http://www.talk-and-learn.com/
online community more for adults to learn ESL

http://www.rong-chang.com/lsnplan.htm

links to lesson plans
http://www.yakitome.com/
web talker
http://www.myenglishimages.com/Home.html
http://www.go4english.com/qg/archive.php?cid=10031001
http://www.readthewords.com/
read text
talking cards
six pairs of contradictory proverbs
http://usalearns.org/index/welcome.cfm?CFID=837533&CFTOKEN=62783027&jsessionid=2c302b74780482afcd135274717f72354472
free site for older students to learn English.
http://capl.washjeff.edu/index.php
This is a site with pictures in categories (also in a few other languages)
http://www.hello-world.com/index.php
learn English. Teachers can keep a grade book. Learn other languages, too
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddp4xrwh_85frrkgtgv&hl=en
this is a test prep site for ELLS
http://lyricsfly.com/search/search.php
http://www.englishexpress.ca/
http://mixturtle.com/
song search
http://rwp.qia.oxi.net/embeddedlearning/interactivesearchresults.cfm
English (and math) for adults
http://www.soundflavor.com/
search songs by theme
spelling bee
words used in context
http://www.esl-lab.com/
listen to conversations and answer questions
site words with Samson
listen and copy and record words
http://www.raphappy.com/
http://www.eslvideo.com/
http://ow.ly/M279
adjective quiz

Comprehension

During our Focus Instruction Group (FIG) started in October I have been reading with a group of mostly girls that speak Spanish at home that have been asked to read and comprehend in English all day long for the last couple of years. I decided that I'd read stories that they already read in English, in Spanish, talk through what I am thinking, how I am relating it to my own prior knowledge, having to suspend my disbelief, wondering about author's purpose, looking for metaphor and simile, personification, alliteration and other literary elements. I can do this fairly quickly and bilingually because most of the literary elements are cognates that they have to learn anyway.