I teach an ELL class of grades 6-8. I am constantly searching for ways to increase their vocabulary knowledge and usage. I thought a blog would be good to use as a way to have students interact digitally and build their vocabulary and digital literacy. The idea is to create a continuing story. Start a blog story at the beginning of the year as you begin vocabulary in your English class. Each week, require students to add to the story, using a logical sentence that both fits the story and uses one of that week’s vocab words. The hope is that the stories will become lengthy and outrageous as the year goes on. My students will be re-reading the words over and over to reinforce them, creating a meaningful story and laughing as they do! Tell me what you think?
-Heather
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Hello, Heather~
ReplyDeleteI really liked your idea for such an important job! Having your English Language learners doing an ongoing project on a blog will not only improve their language and technology skills, but will also their increase their acclimation to American life as well. One concern of mine about the idea is how the vocabulary words will work for the length of the school year. Will the students burn out with going over the same words again and again? Or would they need that repetition any way? Will the vocabulary words be conducive to making a story, week after week, or are you taking more of a ‘Mad Libs’ approach to the stories? If you want to make a more long-term story (or stories), perhaps you could add in extra vocabulary, so the students have more opportunities to make a story that ‘flows.’ It appears to be a wonderful idea, and I am certain that your instinct will guide you through my few concerns!
Theo
Theo,
ReplyDeleteThat is a good point about the repetition and length of the story. I hope that through the school year, students focus on learning the new vocabulary terms in terms of reading the story for context and to incorporate sentence structure with variety. This assignment can be then used for next year and students can reflect on the progess their sentences have made over the course of a year. It is like a portfolio of writing online for the class.
I love your idea of using a continuing story as the basis of blogging for your ELL students. In the past, I have used vocab words as the basis for stories/paragraphs in my regular ed 7th & 8th grade Communication Arts classroom. Some students really take off and their creativity runs wild! Others really struggle with this!
ReplyDeleteThings to watch for: sometimes students understand the idea and meaning of a word, but they are using it in the wrong part of speech. For example, they use a noun word in it's adjective form. I would imagine that the ELL students might have some issues with this as well. Try-as-I-might, I got blank stares when I tried to fix this!
You probably already do this, but I suggest using the words in several sentences when they are learning the meaning, so they have some contextual reference when they are writing their story entries. Usually, we go over vocab for the first time as a whole class. We come up with pop culture type sentences and references when we use the words in an example sentence. This is really fun! Several weeks ago, one of our vocab words was belligerant. We read the definition, talked about what a belligerant person "looks like." Then we used it in a sentence. I asked if they knew any characters on TV that were belligerant. One student said, Scrappy Doo is! Then we found in the Thesaurus that scrappy is a synonym for belligerant!
Best of luck to you in your endeavor of creating a living story online! Keep us posted on your progress!
Lisa