Lillian Marshall

A46383705

November 25, 2018

TE 845 Final Project – ESL Learner

Introduction

Working with students who are not native speakers of English can be challenging; the

teacher needs to meet the student at his or her level, services need to be provided to the student,

and the teacher needs to meet the goals of family, child, and curriculum. I think that the course

text that most closely supports my goals of becoming a more effective teacher to all language

speakers is Teaching Reading in Multilingual Classrooms (D. Freeman & Y. Freeman, 2000).

My largest goal as a teacher of young learners is to inspire them to love reading, especially as

they come into that skill by the end of the year. I find it imperative to incorporate a variety of

meaningful texts to my students, especially because they create connections between peers.

The child I chose to work with is in my class. He is 5 years old and is a dual language

learner. He speaks Hmong at English at home and English at school. This child is considered a

dual language learner due to his age; he is developing fluency in both languages. From the

beginning of the year he has grown immensely in letter name and letter sound knowledge. He is

able to demonstrate 100% accuracy of capital letters (knowing all of them consistently),

demonstrate 92% accuracy of lowercase letters (consistently recognizing 24 of 26 letters), and

knows 22 letter sounds; in my grade students only learn short vowel sounds. My student’s social

language is very strong. He is able to play and interact with his peers appropriately the majority

of the time. I have noticed that sometimes his language is prohibitive when he is stressed; for

instance, if he is attempting to work through a conflict with a peer, he is quick to shout or cry
because he does not yet have the language to express how he feels or ask for what he needs or

wants. Academically, he fits in with his peers based on his experiences in the classroom and

personal motivation to learn.

For this project I chose to do a lesson about the history of Thanksgiving because that is

what my class has been studying right now. Initially I was apprehensive due to Thanksgiving

being somewhat controversial in today’s political climate, as well as I was concerned about there

being little relevance to this particular child’s cultural background. However, this is where the

family’s goals come in to play; my student’s mom is insistent that her child integrate as much as

possible into American culture, so I decided to go for it.

Lesson

The purpose of this project is to focus on a nonfiction subject, and as mentioned before I

chose Thanksgiving, specifically centered on the text The Very First Thanksgiving Day by

Rhonda Gowler Greene.

Lesson Objective Students will be able to define key words and use them correctly to

retell the story.

Resources The Very First Thanksgiving Day by Rhonda Gowler Greene

Picture and Vocabulary cards (see below; not all used for this lesson)

Vocabulary Pilgrims: The group of people who traveled on the Mayflower to the

New World

The Mayflower: The ship the Pilgrims

traveled on

Native American: The group of people who lived in the New World.

They taught the Pilgrims how to survive.

 Feast: Large meal the Pilgrims and Native Americans shared

Harvest: Vegetables that the Pilgrims grew with the help of the

Native Americans

New World: What is now known as the United States. It was a New

World to the Pilgrims

Format Activating Prior Knowledge/Pre-reading Question: What is

Thanksgiving? Why do we celebrate Thanksgiving?

 Record thinking on chart paper

Content:

 Thanksgiving is actually celebrated in our country because of

a group of people working together a long time ago. This

story is about how the first Thanksgiving celebration came to

be! Together we will read and learn about the people that

worked together and why it was so important that they did.

 Reading

o define vocabulary words as they appear in the story

o answer questions/take comments as children have

them

 Retell story using the vocabulary cards

Assessment Students will retell the story, choosing their own perspective of

Pilgrim or Native American

Reflection

This student had very little background knowledge of what Thanksgiving was. I had kind

of expected this, as though he has lived in the United States for his whole life, this is his first

time learning about Thanksgiving in any formal context. When asked the prereading question, he

said, “you say ‘thank you’ when someone does something nice”. I was pleased by this because

that pulled out the basis for me to elaborate. We talked more about how Thanksgiving is a time

to say ‘thank you’ to all of the people who help you and love you. He replied that his mom helps

him and then also told me a story about how our principal had helped him that morning when his

coat was stuck in his locker.

I was also really pleased that he was able to make a text-to-self connection when we

talked about the Pilgrims traveling, because his grandma had come to visit them from China last

summer – he was very adamant that she had flown, not traveled by boat.

I think that some of the academic language was lost though. He could remember Pilgrim

and Native American, but none of the other vocabulary words from this lesson. However, this

was the first lesson during our week study of Thanksgiving (leading up to the holiday itself). I

think that this could be mostly due to my emphasis as a teacher because I have been trying to be

very conscious of my use of the term “Native American” instead of “Indian” and so I did a lot

during the story to talk about the two groups of people, so that’s perhaps what stuck the most.

Therefore a lot of the conversation was about how the Native Americans taught the Pilgrims how

to farm and how to make houses to survive.

 Below is my student’s assessment:

As you can see, there is not a ton of detail in the picture, so I added labels as my student

told me what each part was. He is the red crayon person, labeled “me”, and he is holding “other

food”. The black crayon person is labeled “pilgrim”. The green scribbling is “corn”. I asked what

was happening in the picture and he said that he is “showing him what to do”. It took a lot of

talking to get this much language from this student, as he initially answered every question I

asked about his picture with shrugs.

I think moving forward, I need to do a lot more talking about reading with this student. I

can use more of the strategies from Chapter 7 of Teaching Reading in Multilingual Classrooms

(D. Freeman & Y. Freeman, 2000) where children create larger scale projects from reading a

variety of unit texts. I think that this will be helpful for him because even though he talks and

makes connections the whole time I am reading (seriously, for every single story we read), he

couldn’t tell me about what he had learned very easily after the fact even though he had drawn it.

This tells me that I need to be talking more commonly about what we are studying and reading,

using the academic language in a more authentic way in my classroom.

 References

Freeman, D. E., & Freeman, Y. S. (2000). Teaching Reading in Multilingual Classrooms.

Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Greene, R. G. (2002). The Very First Thanksgiving Day. N.p.: Atheneum Books for Young
Readers.