Teaching goals for English Language Arts

These are our current objectives for English language study with our children. These are very high level goals, but we feel it is important to write these down so that they can guide our detailed choices. Ultimately, our hope is to guide the kids to be independent learners.

Strong Readers (in-bound communication)

• Able to use reading as a tool for further learning. This means they must:
• Enjoy reading
• Have a large vocabulary and tools to build their vocabulary
• Good comprehension and tools to analyze what they are reading
• Familiarity with sources of information
• Read a wide variety of material: topics, authors, styles, forms

Writing (out-bound communication)

• Able to communicate ideas clearly and effectively (writing and speaking)
• Comfortable with the mechanics of writing: vocabulary, spelling, grammar, punctuation, physical writing and typing
• Learn a writing process: research, brainstorming, forming ideas, organizing ideas, drafting, revising

Conduit for other content

We will make use of language activities that also teach them:

• History: having data of history to learn from the past, ideas of historiography and perspective
• Science: technical jargon, tools to understand and develop scientific frameworks
• Philosophy and comparative religion: what are the great questions, different perspectives, forming their own values and understanding those of other people
• Current events: understanding the current context of their lives

Develop skills that support other language learning

• Grammar frameworks
• Methods for learning vocabulary
• Motivation

How to do science (short story)

J1 has been at home sick the whole week. Each day, he writes a journal entry, usually a short story.

How do people jump?

One day, Ms. Jump got a call from Ms. Silly. She asked her to go to her home to jump for her
because she was doing research on how to jump.

When Ms. Jump got to Ms. Silly's home, she gave Ms. Jump 50 pounds as payment.
So Ms. Jump jumped and Ms. Silly recorded the jump.

Ms. Silly said, "Oh, now I understand. We make our head go up and down to jump!"

Language games (first class)

We had an opportunity to spend some time with the 2nd grade class today playing some language games.

Warm-up
Not exactly a game, we got them started with a quiz on some frequently written words:

a, the, and, I, to, was, my, of, we, he, she

After the quiz, the kids took turns writing the words on the board and we talked about a couple of tricky points:

1. "to" vs "two:" yes, they sound exactly the same, but mean different things. No one thought about "too" at this time (isn't English wonderful?)
2. "th" sound: one of the English sounds that doesn't appear in Thai. Actually, there are two distinct sounds made by the "th" combination, but even most native speakers don't realize this (compare "this" and "with.") The fun thing about "th" is that we can exaggerate and stick out our tongues!
3. "sh" is another one that doesn't exist in Thai

We gave out a list of top 100 sight words and will quiz another 10 (or so) next week. We talked through some practice/memorization strategies so everyone can prepare.

Making words (PDQ variation)

We have a set of cards to make 3 letter words. On one side, the cards have parts of pictures and a letter, so when you put the 3 matching cards together it will spell out a 3 letter word that describes the picture. For example: cow, zoo, hat, pin, fin, etc. The other side just has the letter in larger size.

For our game, I drew out two cards and showed the letter side. We then competed to make words that contained those two letters. To practice, we all worked together.  After getting comfortable, we split into two groups. For each round, two kids would go head-to-head, but their teammates could give them suggestions. The winner of each round was the person who came up with the longest word that uses both letters (though we sometimes awarded the person who came up with the most words). and that team would get the two cards.  Each round took 1-2 minutes.

A boggle twist

After going through all the players a three or four times, each team had collected a decent collection of letters. We then gave them 5 minutes to write down all the words they could make using only the letters they had collected.

Summary

Together, we found these activities were fun and engaging for the kids and good practice spelling. I think the slightly different mental processes involved in the two games made a good combination for the session.

The kids were making active use of their 100 sight words lists, so this turned into a good way to familiarize them with the list and give them some extra motivation for learning all the words.

Predestination stories (reading lessons)

who: J1 (guest appearances by J2 and J3)
when: early afternoon
where: in the dining room
what material did we use: pack of sight words, Usborne book of Fairy Tales, Jeffrey Archer collection of short stories.

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We have started to be more consistent about the literacy activities we are doing with the kids.

Warm-ups

We have found very quick warm-up activities worked really well in the math classes we teach at school, so we thought we'd do the same for our literacy sessions. We are still in the process of collecting appropriately short and fun activities, but here is a short list of things we've done so far:

• Sight word sentences: using a pack of sight words, draw 2 and then form a sentence with them. The sillier, the better!
• Sight word story: take 6 or 8 sight words and form a short story with them. 
• Crazy Sentences: reading the strange sentences that come out of this program which was inspired by a game from Peggy Kaye (whose site looks like a good source for other qiuck games).
• Talk about a picture: this is a direct translation of one of our math warm-up activities

Intro to predestination (aka Sleeping Beauty)

For the main event, J1 read (or re-read) the first story in our fairy tale book. As he was reading, I wrote out a couple of questions for us to discuss:

1. What is the location of the story?
2. Who are the main characters (2-4)?
3. What is the conflict in the story?

Of course, these are generic questions we can discuss for almost every story he reads. There were several highlights in our discussion.

What happens with the mean fairy?
In our version, the mean fairy only shows up once, explicitly, in the story, to curse Rose. It is implied in the pictures, that she shows up later to introduce the fated spinning wheel. J1 was strongly drawn to this interpretation based on his own narrative sense of closure and connection. We were a little disappointed that she didn't figure in the ending sequence, but more on that later . . .

Why was Florien successful in rescuing Rose?
Prior to his attempt, several other chaps made an effort and were unsuccessful. J1 said that the reason he was successful seemed to have something to do with Rose drawing Florien's picture earlier in the story and Florien dreaming of Rose. Of course, we don't know how many pictures of princes Rose actually drew, how exact the likeness was to Florien, nor whether the unsuccessful princes had dreamed of Rose or not.

We talked about other stories and came up with these suggestions:

• Maybe Rose and Florien were partners in a prior life (an idea J1 got from the Thai Ramakien)
• Maybe Florien did something nice for the mean fairy and she granted him the ability to rescue Rose. J1's favorite version: The mean fairy turned into a squirrel to run through the forest. She accidentally got caught in a hunter's trap. Florein found her and bandaged her wounds.
• Maybe Florien defeated the mean fairy in battle and won the power to rescue Rose. This version was accompanied by some wild jumping around in a simulated sword (Florien) vs lighting blast (mean fairy) battle.

Predestination vs Free Will
I told J1 about two competing theories: predestination and free will and then we went back to the story to see whether/how each theory was represented. There was a very clear winner, with predestination getting all the points:

• Rose's story told in advance by the curse/blessings of the fairies.
• Rose predicts Florien saving her by her drawing
• Florien predicts saving Rose by his dream
• The other princes fail to save her "just because" (because they weren't fated to do so)
• The king acts to prevent the foretold curse by destroying spinning wheels in the land, but the fate is inescapable

The last point flagged up a classic element of predestination stories: even if the characters take action to change their fate, the results still end up the same. Often, the action taken to prevent the fate is somehow critical in causing it to happen.

Appointment with Death
By chance, I had just read this short story in a Jeffrey Archer anthology. I got it out and we read it together, then talked more about predestination vs free will.

Some other tidbits from the chat:
- who is Death? Why do people anthropomorphize death like this?
- why does the story seem to suddenly shift to first person, form Death's perspective? Is the story more or less clear written this way?

Daily Journal

J1 and J2 both have small notebooks for writing a daily journal. They usually write something about what happened that day, but are free to write whatever they want. Sometimes, it becomes a short story or even a never-ending story.
We talk about what they wrote and then make a vocabulary list related to their note. Usually, it is formed from words they mis-spelled, but the vocabulary words could be things they spelled correctly that highlight interesting patterns or a word they didn't use that is related to the topic.

What about the little one?

For J3, we have been working on phonics and letter recognition. Each evening, we have a focus letter or sound that we ask her to find as we read bedtime stories together. Also, we have been singing phonics songs, particularly ones from this collection: Jolly phonics