Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Small Group Systematic ELD-- 1st Grade B/EI at Garfield Elementary with Merce Guixa



00:00 Intro
00:30  Open the Lesson
2:34:   Model and Practice - I Do / We Do
16:47  Practice the Language - You Do
25:09  Close the Lesson
26:06  Comments from Mercè - Chunking the lesson on the fly

I taught systematic ELD at the Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade levels when I was a classroom teacher. I am now a TSA at Garfield Elementary, where we use systematic ELD in Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade during Designated ELD. We use ADEPT as an internal assessment to group students based on their proficiency level for ELD. For 1st and 2nd grade we teach ELD in small groups, as you can see in the video, which shows a group of 1st graders at a beginning/early intermediate level.

The lesson in the video is from lesson 3, week 2 of the The Art of Getting Along. The objective of the lesson was for students to use I need with classroom vocabulary to make requests, pronouns it’s or they’re, and prepositions in, on, next to and under to tell where something is located. Previous to this lesson, students had already learned the prepositions in and on, and were asked for object locations using where is and are with associated classroom vocabulary.  

The systematic ELD lessons are designed for 40 minutes of instruction but our Designated ELD time in small groups is for a shorter amount of time. I planned the lesson to include and practice all the elements described in the learning objective and including all five parts of the lesson flow--the opening, the I do, the we do, the you do and the closing, but in this short amount of time.

However, while teaching the lesson, I realized that students were struggling using all the prepositions together so I made the decision to just practice sentences with the plural form of the verb and the pronoun they and leave the singular and the pronoun it for another day. This is an example of “chunking” the objective into smaller pieces and taking two days to do one lesson. It is often necessary with Systematic ELD lessons and it is also common for the chunking ideas to occur to me as I am teaching a lesson which is when  the needs of students become clearer. This is often true even when I have planned well.

Even though it might seem that this chunking is slowing down the pacing, I believe it is about the “quality” time to practice over the “quantity” of the lessons being taught. And again, providing students with multiple opportunities to practice the language will only help and reinforce their learning.

As I explained at the end of the video, the follow up for this lesson would be to review and practice the same language and with the added singular form of the verb to be with it. This would provide students with more opportunities to practice the language and grammar with a special emphasis on the prepositions.


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