Spooky Season Co-Teaching

 I am so blessed to be able to work with Connie Chan. One day in the future, I will dedicate an entire post just on her, but for today's post, I want to focus on the work we have been doing with our multilingual learners. Connie and I have ESL as part of our teaching responsibilities. This year, we decided to coordinate our efforts, especially because we share some of our junior division students.

I'm usually not a "holiday activity" type of teacher. I'm often worried about prioritizing some festivities over others and accidentally alienating or offending people. This year, Connie and I leaned into some traditional October tasks and the students really loved them.

Pumpkin Carving

Connie purchased two pumpkins and together the Junior ESL class voted on which face to replicate and carved it. This coincided nicely with the non-fiction book writing assignment that they are undertaking. Connie wrote a sample non-fiction book about pumpkins that we read as a group to identify non-fiction text features and prepare them with helpful vocabulary.

My contribution to this carving involved word review (carving / voting), contemplative questions that lent themselves well to potential future STEM challenges (Why do we carve pumpkins? What other fruits would be good to carve?), documenting via photographs and offering a larger space to complete the carving. We also did some impromptu research to discover if skinny pigs are allowed to eat pumpkin.

Connie will follow up this event today (Monday, November 3) by seasoning and roasting the pumpkin seeds for the students to eat. I won't be there at that time, because I'll be teaching Guidance Education during those periods, but I know that the students will have a great time. They love to eat!

Halloween Hunt for Treats

I assembled some treat bags for all the students I see for ESL instruction and I included Connie's junior division ESL students into the mix. However, the students had to earn these goodies with some authentic reading using directional words.

Rather than hide the actual treat bags, I hid a giant stuffed turtle that each student had to locate based on their personalized clue. While individual students were searching, the rest of the students were creating "silly sentences" using dice, as well as playing a simple version of Battleship with house locations and Halloween subjects. Connie did a great job of monitoring the conversations between partners.

The students had a great time and there was a lot of learning that occurred. Thanks Connie for pushing me out of my "holiday-free zone" to embrace the current environment for engaging tasks.