1. Briefly describe the instructional goals that formed the basis of your interaction with ‘your’ ELL student(s), as well as each learning activity that served as the vehicle for meeting those goals. Note whether ELL students were participating in the same learning activity as their non-ELL peers, or if they were working on an ‘adapted’ activity.
My goal for the interaction with the ELL student was to help Ville to participate more with the group by having him complete the second day’s reading and written homework using sentence frames and a Think Aloud approach with me as his partner to help him better comprehend the reading. I wanted Ville to feel more confident with his responses, …show more content…
The initial activity that I performed was the Think Aloud reading with the ELL student. Through this activity, I was able to assist Ville with engaging with understanding the less explicit aspects of the text. I modeled how I would approach a word that I found confusing or a paragraph that I did not understand. Then, Ville would take a turn using the strategies that I modeled as I was reading. After completing the reading, we discussed the chapters and what we liked about them and what we wish we could change if we were the authors. Then, I guided him through his Socratic Seminar worksheet to complete the assigned homework, which was creating questions that he would ask his group mates the following day. I provided Ville with a variety of sentence frames to help guide him through the creating of the questions. While he struggled to think of questions for each category, I helped by reminding him of questions that he had while he was reading the text during our Think Aloud reading. All in all, I provided Ville with a variety of strategies to assist with his instruction and lots of general encouragement to help him progress through the reading and the written assignment. In order to get through the written assignment, I provided Ville with some written language skill assistance by provided him sentence …show more content…
Therefore, he is accustomed to my strategies and he is comfortable with me as a partner while working through assignments. However, this activity was performed during the week before the end of school year activities. His motivation and engagement was on par with his peers with this in consideration, but it would have been better if performed earlier on in this novel unit. I liked performing the Think Aloud with Ville and I feel that he would have comprehended much more of the text if he was able to work one-to-one with the teacher during the reading groups. I feel that this would have been able to encourage Ville to use different strategies throughout the entire novel to help his comprehension rather than just the final chapters. Additionally, I sense that it would have been beneficial for Ville to have more pre-teaching for various vocabulary words that are used throughout the text as well. Also, I know that he has access to sentence frames from me, since I am his ELL teacher, so I think I need to work with my students more to encourage them to feel comfortable using sentence frames outside of my classroom. In retrospect, I wish that I was able to work with Ville earlier in this class to teach him and work with him to use these strategies outside of my ELL class. Also, I think that I would have moved him into a