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LEADING WITH THE HEART IN MIND
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Teaching With The Heart In Mind

Grade 1 ESL In Action

19/4/2014

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What a busy and productive time we’ve had in Grade 1 ESL, both before and after the April break! I will try to briefly outline for you the main events that our lovely students were involved in.

First of all, thank you very much for attending our Student Led Conferences before the break. Our students were obviously very proud and happy to share their learning with you and also to let you experiment what it’s like to be a student in Grade 1 ESL.

We love our current Unit of Inquiry, “Mini-Beasts”. Students are very excited and actively engaged in learning about the characteristics, roles and importance that the different mini-beasts have in our world. They totally enjoyed our mini-beasts walk before the break and were fascinated by all the mini-beasts they discovered. This week’s visit to the Natural History Museum added a plus of information and excitement to our learning process. This week we also learned that butterflies and bees are attracted by brightly coloured flowers, so we decided to plant our own garden. Thank you, Ms. Dingle, for putting together this wonderful  movie for us.
In writing this week, we focused on recounts of the fun things we did during the April break. Our students are becoming very skilled at verbally sharing their experiences and at writing them in a logical sequence in a recount. We also keep focusing on using powerful, interesting adjectives in our recounts, which the students enjoy tremendously and which makes our writing fabulous. 

Our reading lessons are gaining in complexity, as the books that we read require more inference and an increased ability to start reading between the lines in order to get the whole gist of the story. Our beginner’s group is focusing on easier books, which help them develop their English vocabulary, while also developing their reading skills. We also continued to study specific phonics and blends, and to use them through games and various other activities.

All the ESL students participated in the competition ”It’s Speaking Time at IST”. They proved to be very courageous, hard-working and knowledgeable; most of all learned their poems by heart and all of them recited their poems confidently in front of their classmates and teachers. Well done! I especially want to congratulate Alice, who has been chosen to be one of the 4 Grade 1 representatives going to the next phase of the competition. Keep up the great work, Alice! We are very proud of you!

I want to end by congratulating Alice, A Jin and Young Ju for all their hard work throughout this year. While they haven’t officially exited the ESL register yet, they will only receive in class support from now on and will not join us in the pull-out sessions any more. Well done, all of you!

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