Overview of the presentation ☼ School context ☼ Overview of the project ☼ Strong & weak points ☼ Oh! Oh! A problem... ☼ Classroom management and other theory

La Capitale ♪ Sainte-Odile School in La Capitale school board ♪ There are 215 students in this school ♪ Grade 1 to 6 in the English Core Programme ♪ The school is located in Limoilou ♪ The students are mainly from a low income family ♪ Some of them come from many different countries and are newly arrived in Québec

Project overview – Strategy focus ☺ Project was done with multilevel 1/2 ☺ It lasted 3 periods ☺ Each period there was at least one strategy focus There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly ☺ The storybook used was There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly by Pam Adams

Activities ♠ Introduction to the vocabulary ♠ Listening to the story Strategy focus ♠ Practicing strategy: repeat after the teacher, look at flashcards, say the name of the animals ♠ Predicting strategy: guess the next animal in the story (“What will the old lady swallow next?”, “Why did she swallow the bird?”), use flashcards and knowledge to predict Goal: Become familiar with the vocabulary and expression of the story.

Activities ♫ Review about the story ♫ Vocabulary reinvestment Vocabulary reinvestment ♫ Arts & Crafts Arts & Crafts Strategy focus ♫ Use of prior knowledge: ask what is remembered from the story, name the animals. ♫ Using resources: use of flashcards on the board, use the storybook, use the teacher or use of own knowledge and others. Goal: Assimilate the story in order to prepare the students for the third period of the project.

Activities ♣ Learn song and gesturessong ♣ Change the animals Strategy focus ♣ Total physical response: learn gestures that go with the song, do those gestures listening to the song ♣ Practicing: practice the gestures and the lyrics of the song.lyrics ♣ Use of prior knowledge: change the animals in the song using animals you know. Goal: To reinvest the song and the animal sizes.

Strong ♦ Students were able to use the strategies. ♦ They responded very well to the story and activities. Weak ♦ Was planned for 2 periods, but took 3. ♦ At some point, the students did not work as fast as I thought they would.

Time management ♥ I had two periods to do that project. I ended up not having time to finish it with the students because it was at the end of my practicum. ♥ I planned it over for the presentation, but I did not have the time to do the last activity completely. The students learned the song and some gestures, but it ended up being more of a reward/dancing activity with my little ones. The version of the song I had was a too fast for them. Solutions ♥ Plan with everything in mind with elementary first cycle students ( e.g. time it takes to bring them to the classroom, to say hello, to do your classroom routine, to go back to their main classroom, etc ). ♥ Do not overwhelm students with too many activities in one period, but do not spend too much time on one activity, they get bored and lose interest.

I… Me… Us… blah… ► Lots of activities were done in teams, therefore I had to use a lot of grandma’s rule (14.11) to keep my students on task. ► Because of the ethnical/economical background of my school, students came from different cultures and were not used to our school system. Therefore in my group, I had students in all seven positions (12.4) presented in Win-Win Discipline. ► Happy/Unhappy faces were used to monitor silence or volume level. After three, we stopped the activity and took a little time to calm down. Kagan, S., Kyle, P. & Scott, S. (2004). Win-win discipline: Strategies for all discipline problems. San Clemente: Kagan Publishing.

Narrow reading √ Krashen ( 2004 ) argues that narrow reading might help second language learners acquire vocabulary more easily. √ Norbert Schmitt and Ronald Carter ( 2000 ) have found that collecting a set of article with the same subject and therefore similarities in vocabulary, help second language learners acquire vocabulary. Their theory can be transferred and the same goal can be achieved with younger learners when reading a storybook which has many recurrent passages. Krashen, S. (2004). The case for narrow reading. Language Magazine, 3(5), Carter, R. & Schmitt, N. (2000). The lexical Advantages of narrow reading for second language learners. TESOL Journal, 9(1), 4-9.