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A Look Back: Here’s My Entire ELL Beginners Seven-Week Unit On Writing A Story (Including Hand-outs & Links)For the next several months, each week I’ll be republishing posts from the past that I think readers might still find useful. This post first appeared in 2017.
Also see: HERE’S HOW I ADAPTED MY ELL BEGINNER’S STORY-WRITING UNIT FOR CONCURRENT TEACHING My previous post, Here Are The Ten Downloadable Graphic Organizers I Use With ELL Beginners To Write A Story, was very popular, so I thought readers would find it useful if I shared my entire seven-week unit on writing a story. I hope you can suggest ways I can make it better. After a simple “Word Splash” (words that I pre-teach like “setting,” “theme,” “protagonist,” and “antagonist”), I use very modified versions of the WRITE Institute‘s story unit as we read two books together: The Story Of Ferdinand and Teacher From The Black Lagoon. We have copies of their full unit, but I only use a three of their graphic organizers (a protagonist/antagonist sheet, a sheet for listing words related to the five senses and a story map) – I’m sure you could create or find other versions (lots of story maps are here, a five senses sheet here, and protagonist/antagonist graphic organizers are here). So, the first week we do the word splash, then I read The Story of Ferdinand from the doc cam while students have their own copies. As you may remember, Ferdinand has his “favorite spot” in the story. At that point, I provide students with this sentence starter: “My favorite spot is ____________________________ because _________________________.” They create posters and share with the class (and create narrated videos). Every six pages or so we stop, students are paired-off, given small whiteboards and markers, and they take turns reading the story to each other while the other writes the words down on the board (if necessary, students can “cheat” by looking at the book). The “reader” checks the accuracy of the “writer.” Afterwards, we complete a story map. The most difficult part of that process is helping students understand “theme” and, to a lesser extent, protagonist/antagonist. So, after the story map is done, students create a poster identifying three of their favorite movies or stories and identify the theme and the protagonists and antagonists. Next, we read Teacher From The Black Lagoon using a similar process, without the “favorite spot” activity. Then we create a Story Map, without following-up with the theme poster. Next, students write their own stories, and that’s where my previously posted ten graphic organizers come in. After they complete handwriting their story, I have a short individual conference to provides simple suggestions (read about my thoughts on error correction at my British Council post, ESL/ELL error correction – Yes, No or Maybe?), and then students type it in Word – the red indicator of errors is obviously very helpful. We conference again, and then students copy and paste it into our class blog. You can see them all here. Then, students record their stories using Speakpipe’s Voice Recorder. It says they only keep the recording online for a few months, but it’s the only stand-alone voice recorder that gets through our district’s content filters. Students record, past them onto our blog, and then I manually copy and paste them that night so it’s on the same comment as their story. Students then read each other’s stories and leave a comment. I fell down on the job here and didn’t originally do as much pre-teaching on commenting as I should have, and it shows. I followed-up the next day with more explicit support, which resulted in a better comment like this. Unfortunately, because of student absences, time constraints and the fact that I was out of class for a couple of days with district meetings, we couldn’t continue with the improved comments (they’ll have another chance later). Instead, at that point I provided students with this guide for their writing a second and longer story. I gave them the option of either revising their first story or starting from scratch. Students worked on their revisions/new stories, but we couldn’t get enough time in the computer lab for them to post all their creations on the blog – yet, at least. Now, we’re moving onto a series of fable lessons. These appeared in my latest book, Navigating The Common Core With ELLs. Fortunately, the publisher has made the lesson plan and all the hand-outs available for free download – no registration required! Just go to the book’s website, scroll to “Downloads” and click on “Fables Lesson Plan.” It teaches fables inductively and leads to students writing their own. I’m in the middle of doing these lessons now. The only change to the book’s lesson plan is that I have three more advanced beginners who, after having done part of the lessons, are now creating a collection of fables from their home countries that we’ll also study. Student-created fables will be posted on the class blog and we’ll try commenting again. Here’s the graphic organizer I’m having students use to create their own fables. So, that’s what we’re doing. Let me know how you think it can be improved! I’m adding this post to The Best Sites For Learning To Write A Story. Addendum: See Video: Trailer For New Animated Move Based On “The Story Of Ferdinand”      Cesar Chavez Day Takes Place This Month – Here Are Teaching & Learning Resources mohamed_hassan / Pixabay
Cesar Chavez Day is recognized as a holiday by a number of states in the U.S., and falls on March 31st — his birthday (or a Monday/Friday that is closest to a weekend). You might be interested in The Best Sites For Learning About Cesar Chavez & The United Farm Workers Union.
 Classroom Instruction Resources Of The Week
Each week, I publish a post or two containing three or four particularly useful resources on classroom instruction, and you can see them all here. You can also see all my “Best” lists on instructional strategies here. Here are this week’s picks: Are you going for mastery or mystery? Rethinking assessment objectives with Tom Guskey is from Teach Learn Grow. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About Effective Student & Teacher Assessments. 11 Smart Student Desk Layouts is from Edutopia. I’m adding it to The Best Resources On Classroom Seating Strategies. A Simple Way to Build Rich Tasks for Group Work is from Edutopia. I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Cooperative Learning Ideas. The Power of Centering Student Exemplars is from Cult of Pedagogy. Exit Tickets is from DistillED. I’m adding it to THE BEST – & QUICKEST – WAYS TO ‘CHECK FOR UNDERSTANDING’.  Ed Tech Digest
Ten years ago, in another somewhat futile attempt to reduce the backlog of resources I want to share, I began this occasional “Ed Tech Digest” post where I share three or four links I think are particularly useful and related to…ed tech, including some Web 2.0 apps. You might also be interested in checking out all my edtech resources. Here are this week’s choices: Picatle is an online geography game. I’m adding it to The Best Online Geography Games. you do not have to use generative ai “art” in your blogs because there are websites where you can get real, nice images for free is from Live Laugh. I’m adding it to The “All-Time” Best Sources Of Online Images. Language Learning App Giant Duolingo Thinks It Can Conquer Math, Too is from The 74. GeoGPT5 is a GeoGuesser-like game, but you’re competing with an AI chatbot. I’m adding it to The Best Online Geography Games. The Size of Anything lets you compare…the sizes of countries, lakes, parks, etc. I’m adding it to The Best Online Tools For Comparing The Physical Sizes Of Different Countries.
Page Pebble is a Chrome extension that lets you annotate websites. I’m adding it to The Best Applications For Annotating Websites.  Sentences Of The Week geralt / Pixabay
I thought readers might, or might not, find this new regular post useful. Each week, I highlight several sentences, with links to their sources, that I find interesting/concerning/useful. And they may, or may not, be directly connected to education. I may also include my own comments or related links. This regular post will join my other regular ones on teaching ELLs, education policy, Artificial Intelligence, infographics, and Pinterest highlights, not to mention sharing of my regular Education Week posts. Here are this week’s sentences: But to keep Gen Z teachers in the long term, a majority of such teachers in the EdWeek survey and other studies say they need more flexible work structures, such as four-day weeks and more planning time during the workday. One of the things that we do so frequently with kids is say, “Don’t do this,” but then we don’t tell them what we want them to do. What is clear when one looks across East and West, North and South, is that the states that have built lasting educational success—whether Massachusetts in the 1990s or Mississippi today—have done so through patient, systemic investment in schools and in the people who work in them. Research shows that eating school breakfast is associated with a variety of positive outcomes for students, including improved academic performance and classroom behavior and better health outcomes. Roughly one in five student interactions with generative artificial intelligence on school technology involved cheating, self-harm, bullying, and other problematic behaviors, according to data collected and analyzed by Securly, a company offering internet filtering and other safety services. And yet the people who wave their hands and talk about some magical “AI” future insist they’re the realists; and the ones who want to fund schools and not the military, who want to hire teachers not buy tech gadgets, who want to build a future that cares for people not profits – we’re the dreamers; we’re the crazy ones. Designated e-readers can mitigate some of these problems, but research suggests that the absence of a third dimension—the fact that we do not physically turn pages—makes remembering what we read harder. You might be interested in The Best Resources On Which Is Best – Reading Digitally Or Reading Paper? Doucleff explains this with science—people who seem to have strong willpower, she writes, are actually just better at constructing environments that remove temptation, and that’s what we should do for our kids and ourselves, with screens and food. Routine digital exposure in instructional contexts is associated with weaker academic outcomes in a dose-response relationship. Student engagement measures proved to be key predictors of absence patterns. Third graders who had to repeat a grade in Texas were far less likely to graduate from high school or earn a good living as young adults, nearly two decades later. Reliance on AI among faculty is also on the rise, with observers pointing to the dystopian possibility that the college experience may soon be reduced to AI systems grading AI-generated homework – “a conversation between two robots”. “What tends not to [work] is, without throwing them under the bus again, sort of the approach that LAUSD had which was: let’s get out there quickly, let’s make it splashy, let’s make sure that we scale immediately,” Aguilar said. Political pressure is prompting more than a third of social studies teachers to axe some topics from their lessons, according to a new survey. “A war that was meant to prevent Iran from having a bomb could be the war that actually pushed Iran beyond the Rubicon to reach a bomb,” said Danny Citronowicz, an analyst at the Atlantic Council, a think tank, and former head of the Iran branch of Israel’s military intelligence. He and his colleagues found that “teens who have very little screen time are actually seeing a greater rise in insufficient sleep than teens with heavy screen use,” he says.
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