During this month, I’ll be taking a break now-and-then from blogging to both take some R & R and to finish-up some more extended writing projects.

During this short break, I’ll be re-posting some of my favorite posts of 2018.

You might also be interested in A Look Back: All My Favorite Posts From The Past Eleven Years In One Place!

 

I’m a big advocate of creating situations where students can teach their classmates (see The Best Posts On Helping Students Teach Their Classmates — Help Me Find More) , and often have one of my classes act as teachers to my other classes.

I thought readers might find it interesting to hear about what we did today.

My ELL World History class, now taught by Kelsie Burnell, an exceptional student teacher, prepared a lesson for my ELL Beginners on World War One.  Two World History students each taught small groups of two-to-five ELL Beginners.

After students got into their groups, they watched this video, and the “teachers” supported their “students” in creating some sentences describing what they saw:

Then, teachers showed this image of trench warfare and assisted students to use words to label the image (similar to the Picture Word Inductive Model).

Next, teachers helped their students complete clozes/gap-fills about the image, which you can download here.

The teachers then shared a Read Aloud about World War I (that can be found on the same downloadable sheet as the clozes).

Finally, we distributed mini-whiteboards and markers. Students in the small groups took turns reading the cloze sentences and sentences from the Read Aloud, and the other students would write them down on the whiteboard (ideally, without looking).

This is very similar to the sequence of activities student “teachers” often use in our classes.

Feedback from readers on how it can be improved is welcome!