Over the next 2 weeks we will be measuring students' current developing English language skills. This assessment measures students' speaking, listening, writing, and reading skills in English and will be broken up over a few days. This is an opportunity for students to show us examples of their best English language use in a one-to-one environment. There is no need for students to prepare for this test! We will use the information gathered from this assessment, along with other assessments and in-class work, to measure progress as well as to help us know how best to support your child next school year. We will be able to share your child's progress with you at the end of the year at the last conference.
New Learning ResourceWe are very pleased to announce that AISB now has access to BrainPop in Chinese! If you are not familiar with BrainPop, it is an educational tool to help students learn academic content related to our units of study (and many other topics, too). We use the English versions of BrainPop, BrainPop Jr, and BrainPop ESL often at school. Having access to the Chinese version means that our students who speak Chinese at home can now access the information in both Chinese and English, maximizing their comprehension of key academic concepts. You can access this resource from home at http://www.brainpop.cn/ Your child should know the login and password details, but if not, please email your child's EAL teacher and we will be happy to share it with you directly. See the '5th Grade Learning Links' for some specific English BrainPop videos related to our academic learning. Book ClubsBook clubs have been a focus in 5th grade recently, and many students are participating in class book clubs. Books clubs involve reading and discussing books in small groups. Often members of a book club will read the same book, but it is possible for each member to read different books and discuss and compare them. Book clubs are a great way for students to:
During book clubs, students are expected to share their thinking, give reasons for their opinions, and provide evidence from the text to support their ideas. The following ‘text talker’ sentence frames are a good resource to help students use academic language to support their thinking with evidence from the text. Please take a few minutes to look at the ‘text talker’ resource below with your child. Ask your child to tell you about something they read today, using one of these sentence frames to get started. Start your own book club at home! Parent-child book clubs are a great way to get to get your child thinking and talking about reading! Choose a book in English or your home language. If you are interested, see this article with more information about family book clubs or talk to your child's teacher or EAL teacher for book suggestions.
Welcome back and Happy New Year to all of our families! We are starting off the year with a new social studies unit about Governments. Students are learning about different types of government systems, political ideas, and how the government system has changed here in Hungary over the last 60-70 years. Our EAL team is working to support students throughout this unit by focusing on some of the vocabulary and concepts related to government systems and by practicing our oral academic language in this area through class discussions of related topics. As well, we are learning how to navigate non-fiction texts and make use of non-fiction text features, such as headings and glossaries, to help students make sense of the information they are reading in books and other non-fiction sources, and to write their own non-fiction texts based on what they are learning. We encourage families to discuss the topic of government systems at home in your home language, and to share with your child about how your home country's government came to power, how it works, and what the roles and responsibilities of the government and citizens of your home country are. Some great class discussions came from the photograph and question prompts shown in the picture above. Students shared their thinking orally and learned some important unit-related vocabulary as they did so. Students have been synthesizing their learning by considering how the new information they have learned fits with, adds to, or changes their previous ideas. They have been using the sentence format, "I used to think.....and now I think....." to express their ideas and clearly show how their thinking has grown. Students have been learning about many different types of non-fiction text features and their purposes toward helping us to better read and understand non-fiction texts.
Have you ever wondered what candy canes have to do with Christmas? Or why people kiss under the mistletoe at this time of year? And just what is the Christmas Pickle?!? With the holidays upon us, 5th grade EAL students Jenna, Kalle, Sam, Massimo, and Valeriya have been working on applying their learning about identifying the main idea and key details in non-fiction text by doing a mini research project on a holiday tradition and presenting it to the class. We found out lots of little-known facts behind some interesting holiday traditions! PS - In case you were wondering, candy canes represent 'J' for 'Jesus' (we've been holding them upside down all this time!) and were invented over 200 years ago! And people kiss under the mistletoe because it's good luck, and they are supposed to pick off one berry before kissing - when all the berries are gone, there's no more kissing! And the Christmas Pickle is a pickle-shaped ornament that is hidden somewhere on a Christmas tree - whoever finds it first, gets a prize! I think I'll start hiding a pickle in our holiday tree! I loved learning more about these and more holiday traditions!
Wishing all of our students and their families a relaxing holiday break! See you in 2016! Our 5th grade EAL Super Learners have been very busy this past month! Students have been working hard on their narrative (story) writing in support of the 5th grade Narrative Literacy and Narrative Writing units as well on developing their academic language related to their science unit on Forces, Motion, and Design and their math unit on Multiplication and Division. Students have been receiving language support in each of these areas as needed. EAL Support for Language ArtsMrs. Valezy's group has been focusing especially on character development in stories, examining how authors use detailed descriptions, dialogue, and characters' actions as evidence to show us what a character is like. They have taken the information they have inferred about their characters to write their own scenes showing how that same character might respond in various situations. Now they are working on applying their learning about character development to their own narrative writing projects. Ms. Sinclair's group has been learning about how to write descriptive small moments narratives, as well as identifying parts of speech. They have been paying special attention to correctly using conjunctions, verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and interjections in their stories. Mr. Gillis' group has been developing their listening comprehension in English through listening to stories and identifying the story elements that are key to narrative writing. All students in 5th grade EAL are receiving support in developing their story arcs for their own narrative writing, planning how the action will rise and fall in their stories. Tony, Ori, and Qi Wei especially enjoyed mapping out the story arc for this funny, short story video about a Princess and a Unicorn. Bin and Jerry have been developing their English grammar skills, particularly their understanding and use of pronouns, the verb 'be', simple contractions, and forming different types of questions. Judy and Tony have been developing their academic language to compare and contrast items through reading, speaking, and writing. Finally, many students have been meeting in Mrs. Valezy's classroom once a week at snack time to listen to short stories in English while they eat and relax. We have a high school student, Jasmine, that comes to read aloud to the students. Support for ScienceMs. Angyal's group has been learning about the vocabulary and concepts needed to understand and participate in the science unit on Forces, Motion, and Design. Students have been speaking, reading, and writing about Newton's Laws of Motion, how simple machines work, and how they help us. Mr. Gillis' group has also been learning some of the necessary science vocabulary and went on a 'simple machines search' around the school, finding examples of simple machines in use at school. Support for MathMany students have been receiving support in math through the use of key vocabulary translations into their home languages as well as picture support for word problems.
We are trying a new format for our EAL website - we hope you like it! Please note that updates are now organized by grade level along the top of the site, instead of by teacher. So if your child is in 5th grade, all EAL news will now be shared here, in the Grade 5 EAL site.
During the past month Grade 5 students in Ms. Angyal's group have been learning about Ecosystems in EAL. They read books about habitats, food chains, animal adaptations like hibernation, migration and camouflage. They learned keywords, discussed facts and compared and contrasted what they learned. They also learned about hybrid animals like ligers and zonkeys. Their final project was to come up with a hybrid animal and introduce its habitat, diet and prey, its predators, adaptations and special features using all the vocabulary and information they learned in this unit. Watch the videos below to hear about animals like the cag, cowp, lionbit and firegoat. Students in Ms. Valezy's group completed their personal narrative writing about a time they did something that made them feel Super! Through this writing assignment, students learned about:
Ask your child to share his/her story with you!
What does it take to be a Super Learner? Sam, Kalle, Jenna, Valeriya and Freya have collaboratively decided there are 3 main actions you need to take:
(1) Take risks (sensible ones!) (2) Try your best (effort!) (3) Persevere (don't give up!) They have been thinking, talking, and writing about how SUPER they are! We have begun practicing our narrative (story) writing by telling about a time when we took one or more of these three SUPER actions. Ask your child to tell you a little about what they have chosen to write about. To learn more about what makes someone a SUPER LEARNER, see our EAL homepage! |
Learning Links
|