Tag Archives: #commoncore

Common Core Uncomplicated: Incorporating Math in World Language Instruction

December 28, 2015 Published by: Lynn

World Language teachers can connect to math and support Common Core State Standards through graphing, surveying, story problems, and activities to develop fluency.

One way world language teachers can connect to math while providing comprehensible input is through graphing. I ask students to list their 10 favorite things to do. I pass out graph paper and ask the first student what is the number one activity on their list. I then ask the class to raise their hands if they have that activity on their top ten lists. We then count hands and graph the results for that hobby, making connections between students who like the same things, and go on to the next student to learn their favorite thing to do. We bar graph hobbies, favorite colors, birthdays, favorite foods, future professions, and anything else that allows us to use the target language. Another favorite graphing activity is the twenty four hour pie charts on how they spend their day.
graphing ty

I ask students “Who is the most important person in your life and why?” I write the question on the board and list possible answers. I do a whip around and have each student give me an answer as a student tallies the responses on the board. Students can analyze, organize, discuss or find an interesting way to present the data. What are some good survey questions? What is your favorite anything is usually a good starting point (team, animal, food, color, class, teacher, current issues). Students can start surveying from day one in the target language with the how are you or Comment ça va? activity from foreignlanguagehouse.com. comment ca va

There are free online survey tools like SurveyMonkey.com, polleverywhere.com, Emodo.com, and my personal favorite GetKahoot.com. You can teach students how to design a survey, collect information, analyze data, and draw conclusions on-line or on paper. I like to keep survey blank forms on hand. You can give each student a different food or activity and have them survey their classmates’ opinions ranging from I love, I like, I don’t know, I don’t like, or I hate.

Try a group number lift. Arrange students in teams and give them cards with numbers from 0-9. Call out a number in the target language and students compete to be the first team to hold up the correct answer. Increase the complexity of the numbers, add operation symbols and give math equations, or story problems. Math fact relays or white board races help reinforce math facts in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division which improves fluency in math, supporting CCSS while practicing the numbers in the target language.

Another way to connect to math is to create story problems in the target language. There are some good examples of story problems for food and clothing on Teacherspayteachers.com in Spanish that could be converted to any language.

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Exploring the metric system for food quantities, clothing and shoe sizes, figuring mileage and converting money all connect to CCSS. We do role plays in café skits and the market. Students use the target language to acquire goods services or information orally or in writing. Once each year we take over the courtyard outside my room and stage “Le Marché” and “El Mercado”. Students bring items to sell from home and set up a store or business. Fake dollars and Euros from Teacher’s Discovery are used and students exchange currencies and buy and sell their goods or services in the target language. Students speaking English are fined and goods are confiscated. Students sell croissants at the boulangerie, doughnuts at the patisserie, coffee at a café or soft drinks at l’épicerie. Students who do not bring a product take a service job like police, banker, custodian and the mayor (me) pays them for their work.

Every day we chart the weather in Fahrenheit and Celsius. Students can now make the conversion between Fahrenheit and Celsius easily and compete to see who can say it first. Weather reports of Countries or cities in the target language reinforce presentational skills and connect to geography and science. Students research the five day forecast for a country in the target language. They prepare a presentation with the high/low temperatures in Celsius &/or Fahrenheit, weather description with graphic, sunrise and sunset with 24 hour clock system. With only three countries in the world not using the metric system, world language teachers can facilitate the acquisition of this skill daily.

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One of our favorite games is a variation of a kid’s counting game called “Buzz.” Students form a circle and count in the target language but cannot say multiples of a predetermined number; instead they say “buzz.” In the original version students are eliminated until there is a winner, which is fun sometimes however some students want to be eliminated in order to avoid participating. In Spanish we play a version called “Arroz y Frijoles” adapted from Bryce Hedstrom. In French I call it “pain et fromage”, it could be peanut butter and jelly in English, use any two words in your target language. Here is a way to play without eliminating students. Divide students into two circles. Students go around counting aloud one at a time in the target language. When they hit a multiple of 5 that students says “Arroz” instead of the number. The counting continues with the next number. The object of the game is to get the highest number. The next day, switch to multiples of 7 and have students say: “frijoles”instead of the multiple of 7. You can then combine and use multiples of 5 and 7 and then a number like 35 is “arroz y frijoles” because it is a multiple of 5 and 7. You can substitute any number for the multiples and any words for rice and beans. One thing that works well is to have the circles compete against each other. When someone misses arroz their circle has to start over with the counting. The person that misses has to go to the other circle but can be absorbed into that circle without them stopping. With this arrangement no one is sitting out, the peer pressure keeps them all trying. Posting the class period and the winning total for each class helps keep motivation going. With this activity we are not teaching math but reinforcing fluency in math which supports CCSS. Screen-shot-2012-01-18-at-10.20.26-AM (1) Even things as simple as having students change the scores on their papers to a percent and decimal helps according to our math department chairperson. Common Core does not have to be complicated. Look for little ways to support math while teaching your target language.

Common Core

Common Core Uncomplicated: Incorporating Writing in World Language Instruction

December 28, 2015 Published by: Lynn

World language teachers can support Common Core State Standards by modeling the writing process and providing a variety of writing opportunities. CCSS specify that students should be spending about 35% of their time writing to persuade, 35% to explain, and 30% to convey an experience. Students in world language classes can write about topics of their choice in the target language that enhance their first language vocabulary and writing skills.

Like reading, writing is a process. First students need something to write about (a topic) and someone to write for (an audience). Teachers can use lots of target language in the prewriting stage. This could be a brainstorm and categorize session, or it might involve research, or both. Then students need to write a draft, edit, revise, and publish.

I love the technique of Semantic feature analysis. I use this to describe character traits and actions, and as a pre-writing activity. Semantic Feature Analysis helps student discern how things are alike or different. It can be used to engage student thinking, as a way to collect data, explore similarities and differences, or as a way to quickly evaluate students’ knowledge. Create a matrix. Along the left side, the students list key terms in the chosen area. Across the top of the matrix, they write features that the words might share. Ask students to them use an “X” to indicate if the feature applies to the word or write in specifics about the features.

semantic-feature-analysis-chart-the-outsiders-worksheet

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One topic of high interest each year is the family and home presentations. This project reinforces writing, speaking, and presentational skills. Students can create any family or present their own. They need to give name, age birthday, hobby, occupation, nationality, and description of themselves and four other people. They also describe their home or future dream home. Students can present with any multimedia format. Use famous families or families from the target culture as examples.

family

During National World Language Week each March my students make “Did you know posters….” These contain facts and graphics about countries that speaks the target language. These are displayed around the school. We have a school wide trivia contest. Students read brochures, books, and websites to create questions about the target languages and cultures. The questions are read by students during the morning announcements. All students in the school are encouraged to put answers in a jar in the library and the first correct answer drawn is the winner, who receives a small prize.

Students can create travel brochures about a country or city where the target language is spoken. This incorporates reading and researching informational text including internet sources, and creating a brochure which involves expository and persuasive writing. Students can present their brochures to the class to practice persuasive speaking in the target language. The brochures can be displayed in library or posted to a class website.

travel_brochure1

Each spring I compete for students to take my class. I call this “sweeps week”. Students use their persuasive language skills to make posters called “Why Study a Foreign Language”. After several YouTube clips, a brainstorm session, and my power point, they are armed with reasons to cover the school with quality posters promoting world language study. We also cook this week so students are following recipes in the target language to create something delicious. You can smell this all over school and students poke their heads in and ask what class is this? It’s really not fair to the other elective teachers.

worldlanguage chart

Chart source: http://smnorthwest.smsd.org/Pages/World-Languages.aspx

Holiday celebrations are especially good to compare and contrast. After viewing a video, some internet research, and a TPRS story in Spanish we find similarities and differences between Day of the Dead and Halloween using a Venn diagram and make cards explaining the difference to friend and family. The same could be done with the Christmas or winter holidays. Social customs for family life and typical holidays connect to Social Studies and encourage students to make comparisons to their own culture. Students could compare the traditions of the quinceanera with a sweet 16 party.

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My students create cities in the courtyard outside my room with butcher paper, spray paint, and chalk. They draw a place to start from a jar containing places in the target language and another student draws a place to give directions to and they act out an impromptu skit. They also write directions (sequencing and expository writing) and drive match box cars around city maps that they created in the fashion of European cities with plazas and major buildings built around the plazas.

map

One research based strategy for increasing student achievement according to Robert Marzano in his book Classroom Instruction That Works is summarizing. I teach summarizing in three steps: delete, keep, and substitute. Keep the important parts, delete the unimportant parts, and substitute a general term for lists, like fruit instead of all the individual fruit names. Students can be required to write a summary or opinion as an exit tickets. This can be done in two Words. Two word summaries force students to synthesize the learning and think of two words to convey the new knowledge.

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This is a good get acquainted activity. Students write 2 facts and a lie about themselves in the target language. This could be about family, hobbies, food, places traveled, thing they did over the summer, or break. In groups they take turns reading their two truths and a lie and see how many members of the group they can fool. Transfer this activity to CCSS by distinguishing fact from opinion. Have students write facts about a topic and their opinions. Have them read their sentences to the class as other students hold up white boards if they think the statement is a fact or opinion.

opinion_fact_sign

Children’s Pattern books are great for students to create spin offs. The Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle is one that can be easily adapted by students changing the things he eats to class objects, clothes, or other food items. One connection to CCSS would be to have the students research foods from the target countries and rewrite the story with examples of foods from the cultures studied. In a dark, dark forest, there was a dark,dark house…In the dark, dark house, there was a dark, dark….???

sombre

Who am I? Students write descriptions of themselves in the target language a create Picasso like self-portraits to go with the paragraphs. We then put the portraits under the document camera, read the paragraph and guess who am I? Another variation is to place the self-portraits around the room and have student walk around gallery style and try to identify the artist. A great website for making the self- portraits is www.Picassohead.com.

picasso

There is a good Poetry unit available from www.foreignlanguagehouse.com. Some examples are: hide and seek poems where students choose ten words from an article to make a poem, Bio-Poems, Diamantes, Acrostics, hello/goodbye poems. Even though there is a focus on argumentative writing, narrative writing also supports CCSS. Student are creating and using higher level thinking skills.

Dictees, dictados, dictations provide immediate feedback for self-assessment. I dictate a few sentences in the target language and students write them as I repeat them slowly over and over again. After I finish the dictation the students check their own work from a correct copy I put under the document camera. I like to use informational passages about Costa Rica or the people of Cameroun from the novels by Kristi Placido, Mira Canion, and Carol Gaab. Check out the novel samples at http://tprstorytelling.com. Running dictation is another fun reading, writing, speaking, and listening activity that I learned from Jason Fritz. Copy of a paragraph of text on a piece of butcher paper and tape it up to a wall outside the room. Students are in teams of three or four. One student is the writer as the other students take turns running outside reading the paragraph and trying to recreate the paragraph in the room.

The refreshed World-Readiness Standards for Language Learning state that learners build, reinforce, and expand their knowledge of other disciplines while using the language to develop critical thinking and to solve problems creatively. It is not a stretch for world language teachers to incorporate more explanatory and persuasive writing strategies. World language educators can examine how they currently teach writing and ways we might be able to support CCSS while teaching the target language.

Common Core

Common Core Uncomplicated: Incorporating Reading in World Language Instruction

December 28, 2015 Published by: Lynn

The Common Core State Standards specify that students in middle school should be reading at a ratio of 55% informational text to 45 % literary text and students in high school 70% informational text to 30% literary text through out the school day. The standards specify that students should be reading myths, legends and stories from other cultures. World language learners can use children’s literature, novels, magazines, textbooks, and on-line resources to practice the reading process. Reading is a process. There are strategies and activities that can be done before, during, and after reading to practice the target language and reinforce reading skills in both languages.

Although CCSS do not advocate for the teaching of pre-reading strategies, it’s what good readers do automatically, and something reluctant readers need to be explicitly taught. Model pre-reading skills in the target language and teach students to use the four P’s: preview, predict, prior knowledge, and purpose. Good readers quickly scan a book or website looking at the title, pictures, graphs, and bold words or headings to help access the information. Previewing helps to get the organization and schema of the reading in their heads. I compare it to when I shop at my local supermarket versus an unfamiliar store. I can shop much more efficiently in a store I am familiar with because I have the schema in my head, the organization.

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Teaching students to predict what will happen next or what the chapter is about helps to keep students engaged. Good readers make predictions in their heads as they read and then continue reading to see if their predictions are true. Anticipation guides and Word splashes are good for getting students to make and confirm predictions. A Word Splash, from Dorsey Hammond at Oakland University, is a collection of key terms or concepts taken from a written passage which the students are about to read. The terms selected represent important ideas or vocabulary that should help the students while reading. Initially the students’ task is to make predictive statements about how each term relates to the title or main focus.

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An Anticipation Guide is a strategy that is used before reading to activate students’ prior knowledge and build curiosity about a new topic. Before reading a selection, students respond to several statements that challenge or support their ideas about key concepts in the text. Using this strategy stimulates students’ interest in a topic and sets a purpose for reading. Anticipation guides can be revisited after reading to evaluate how well students understood the material and to correct any misconceptions. CCSS ask that teachers develop questions, and demand answers, that use evidence from the text to support responses and to defend opinions. The anticipation guide is one way to get students to look for text evidence to support their answers.

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Anticipation-Guide-422x327

Tea Party is another type of prediction activity where sentences from the story are typed up and distributed to students. Students walk around and show each other their sentence silently, trying to make predictions about what they are about to read when they return to their seats. It also familiarizes students with vocabulary in sentences they are about to encounter.

tea party 3

I like brainstorming and categorizing or the Give One, Get One technique adapted from Reading for Understanding to activate prior or build background knowledge. To make a give one get one, have students fold a piece of paper lengthwise to form two columns. Then write “Give One” at the top of the left had column and “Get One” at the top of the right hand column. Have students brainstorm a list of all the things they already know about the topic they will be studying, writing items down in the left column. After they make their individual list, have students talk to at least two other students about their list adding or deleting information as appropriate in the right hand column along with the name of the person who gave them the information.

book pass

I try to collect several different books on a topic, and do a book pass to activate background knowledge. Students sit in a circle and pass the books every minute on cue to gather as much information as they can on the topic. Then they can be put into groups to brainstorm.

The purpose for reading establishes the rate at which you read. If you are reading for pleasure you read more rapidly, if you are reading to learn something you read more slowly, and if you are looking for specific information or just getting the gist you skim or scan. Teaching students to set a purpose for their reading is a skill that will help in English reading tasks as well. The good old KWL chart. Is good for establishing purpose and activating prior knowledge. Students list what they know, what they want to know,and what they learned. Here are simple copies in French Je sais and Spanish Yo sé.

purpose

As a teacher there is one other P, pre-teach critical vocabulary. If there are words that are critical for students to understand the reading, pre-teach that vocabulary through gestures, props or visuals, music, and drawings.

During reading students need strategies for holding their thinking, monitoring comprehension and practice, practice, practice. Reading specialist Cris Tovani recommends exploring methods of “Holding Your Thinking” with students. Good readers take notes, highlight, underline, use sticky notes, or create a graphic organizer to remember interesting or important information and quotes. Marking text forces the reader to look for interesting ideas and helps to hold the lines that the reader can quote to support an idea or opinion which is critical in CCSS. Providing students with symbols for annotating is helpful in holding their thinking for futher discussion.

Good readers monitor comprehension and use fix-it strategies. They stop and think about what they have read. They re-read. They adjust the speed. They speed up or slow down. They skip words and read on. Good readers make connections between the text and their prior knowledge and experiences. They make predictions. They ask questions. They visualize. They use bold words, italicized words, and key words to help them figure things out. They use context clues or other text aids to figure out unknown words.

slow-down-sign

I like to use my class sets of novels to model reading strategies. We read together and I stop every once and a while and make a connection to the text or wonder or think out loud. This is so they can see what is going on inside my head as I read. I make a mistake so I can go back and re-read or use another fix-it strategy. I tell them what I picture in my head. I agree or disagree with the book. I say I am confused about this part. Then I have students practice this with a partner. One reads and “thinks out loud” while the other one listens with a chart and keeps track of their comments. Then they switch roles. It’s a great way to get them to interact with the text repeated times.

think aloud

Close reading is when a section is read over and over again each time through a different lens or perspective. The first time might be to identify cognates. The second might be to get the main idea, and the third might be for specific details or inferences. Close reading requires students to grapple with complex text by answering carefully planned questions that guide them to deep understandings of key ideas through multiple readings of the same passage.

It seems best to try to keep after reading activities authentic. When adults finish reading an article they do not answer a list of questions or do fill-in-the blank type worksheets. What is more natural is to reflect on it, or possibly talk about it with someone. I always reflect through writing after a workshop or reading on what I want to remember, however I seriously doubt the most of my seventh graders do this naturally. For students this reflection could include revising anticipation guides and predictions or summarizing, or keeping journals or reading logs.

I like to have students drawn scenes from the novels or text. This could be in the form of a storyboard, comic strip, or story quilt. For a story quilt students are assigned different sections of a novel or story to illustrate on a piece of construction paper. The squares are taped together, or stitched with yarn, in order resembling a patchwork quilt. Display in Library or on school website. Some great websites to make cartoon strips are www.makebeliefscomix.com or www.toondoo.com.

story quilt

Students like to act out and retell the story, especially with a prop or two. Assign a piece of text to act out and have the students compete in groups for the best reenactment. This gives several repetitions on key vocabulary. Reading activities in the target language support fluency in both languages and CCSS.