Transcript: Grade 2/3 Integrated & Designated ELD

Grade Two and Three Science Integrated and Designated English Language Development

Introductory Slides (00:00–00:33)

Narrator: Welcome to the California Department of Education Integrated and Designated English Language Development Transitional Kindergarten Through Grade Twelve Video Series. This video is used by permission of the owner, Sobrato Early Academic Language Program, a California nonprofit corporation. Copyright 2019, Sobrato Early Academic Language Program. All rights reserved.

Title Slide: SEAL: Sobrato Early Academic Language Model

Title Slide: SEAL Integrated Thematic Unit. 2^nd/3^rd Grade Combination Class. Animal Adaptations in the Ocean Habitat.

Setting up the Context for the Learning (00:34–01:29)

Teacher: So today what we're going to do, we're going to work on our chant. We're going to sing "Protecting the Environment". We're going to work on our— and collaborate on our cooperative strip paragraph. We're going to engage in our rotations about ecosystems. We're going to work on our compare and contrasting of our polygons. Then after lunch, we're going to practice and present our shared research.

Laurie Olsen (SEAL Director): This is both a content rich and a language rich classroom. That's what the thematic units are designed to be. To develop language along with thinking within the context of learning about the world. So, the content is oceans. The language kids are using, the reading, the writing, the development of literacy skills, the engagement in discourse, and dialogue with each other about oceans is also intentionally designed to both develop their language and literacy skills, but also to create the purpose for language and literacy skills. And engage them in the language that they need to express their thoughts and eventually their opinions about the topic.

Students Engaging in the Lessons (01:30–10:18)

Teacher: Well to get started, let's start with our chant "Protecting the Environment".

Laurie Olsen: The class began today with a chant and it was a chant about the ocean ecosystem but particularly about issues of pollution and the problem of adaptation in an environment that is changing due to things like pollution.

Teacher and Students: [chanting] Humans should protect the earth, they must, they must. Humans should protect the earth, they must, they must. Too many dams and poisoning land, isn't providing protection, Man. So, protect our land, forests, and streams and the sea. Bum, bum, bum.

Laurie Olsen: So, they're learning vocabulary from the chants and just chanting it saying it over and over again helps make the language part of their own.

Teacher: Okay so now what we're going to do, we're going to have some of our students present their family projects. And we have a couple different languages that we're going to represent today.

Laurie Olsen: SEAL is fundamentally about language and language development. And language and literacy for the multiple worlds in which children find themselves, grow up in, and need to use those skills. So, we want to support their language and literacy in their home language, as well as in English.

Teacher: So, Dylan, would you like to go first? All right and Dylan's going to talk to us in Portuguese.

Student 1: [In Portuguese] Oceano aqui, Oceano awi. Oceanos por todos us lados. Lindos oceanos sheaus de ondas.

Laurie Olsen: A really important part of a thematic unit is connecting home and school. We want our students to be talking about what they're learning with their families, engaging their families in that learning, and in a way that enables families to really become partners adding their knowledge, adding their excitement about the topic. So that it's truly a partnership around supporting student learning.

Student 1: [In Portuguese] Oceano, oceano, oceano.

 [Applause]

Student 1: I mostly speak English at home because I don't... before this, the project that I got was like I don't know how to speak Portuguese but now I know how to do it. And my mom said that later in the summer, that she's gonna start teaching me Portuguese.

Laurie Olsen: So here we see students bringing in the work that they did with their families, reading it to the class in those languages with a great sense of pride that what they're sharing is not just a poem or a chant, but the product of what they've done with their families.

Teacher: We're going to work on our cooperative strip paragraph next. So, what we're going to do, we have a topic and then we're going to read through it and highlight some of the important parts and the questions that we're going to be answering today.

Laurie Olsen: In a thematic unit, students are being engaged in literacy and language activities in and through studying and talking about the content. So, you will see the reading that they're doing is related to the content. The writing that they're doing is related to the content. The oral discourse is related to the content. That's what we mean by an integrated thematic unit.

Teacher: So, what is it asking us to do? Jazlyn.

Student 2: To compare and contrast.

Teacher: Asking us to compare and contrast. What does compare and contrast mean, Jazlyn?

Student 2: It means like to, to compare and like to compare two things and to um, find the different things about two other things.

Teacher: Okay so find out how they are the...

Student 2: Similar and different.

Teacher: Very good. So, when we go to write our paragraphs, each table is going to choose one of these. [Teacher pointing to chart on the board.]

Teacher: So, you're going to go back to your tables and you are going to discuss and decide which one you would like to do.

Laurie Olsen: The cooperative strip paragraph is a strategy where students are indeed applying and learning writing skills about what they're thinking about and learning about. Their heads are full of, the environment is full of this topic. And so, they're creating their sentences. They're putting them together. They're collaboratively editing it based on an editing checklist and as they do that collaboratively they are internalizing the processes of how to go about good writing. By this point in the unit, the students have built background knowledge. They've built interest and engagement with the topic.

Teacher: Good job. You guys wrote some amazing sentences. We're gonna do some editing today. If you see something that's spelled wrong, give me a thumbs up. Tan, what do you think is spelled wrong?

Student 3: I think it's similar because I think they put an "n".

Teacher: An "n".

Student 3: Yeah.

Teacher: Okay so similar, there are many similarities. You know how to spell “similarities”? No "n". [saying the names of the letters] s, i, m, i, l, a, r, i- (There you go.) t, i, e, s.

Student 3: Yeah.

Teacher: Life cycle.

Students: Life cycle. The circle of life.

Teacher: Okay so what we're gonna do next, we're gonna start our Daily Five. So, we have our researcher center. We have our narrative retell. Sentence patterning. We have the writing center and we have our found poem and our read to a partner.

Laurie Olsen: So, in this classroom today, her Daily Five were choice centers for her students. Each of them that involved writing, inquiry, reading, related to the content but where they're actually building those literacy skills. The research center involved mixing oil and water and doing further inquiry into the whole topic related to oil spills which they've been studying as affecting the ocean ecosystem. They have available over there wonderful sets of books to turn to and read about to understand more about why the oil is affecting the ocean in the way it is. So, it's an inquiry center that involves hands-on reading and talking to each other about their findings as they're doing the experiments. Another typical Daily Five activity is kind of word work.

Title Slide: Sentence Patterning

Several Students: Lighter, smaller, organisms that adapted quickly among the kelp.

Laurie Olsen: And working with vocabulary and working with sentences and grammar kinds of activities. We saw a group today doing what we call the sentence patterning chart which involves really structuring complex sentences that involve adjectives, in this case comparative adjectives, because this is a compare and contrast unit.

Laurie Olsen: So, these students are constructing sentences about the ocean and the ecosystem but doing it in a way that is making them much more aware of how you actually structure a sentence in English and it's a preface to their own writing. So then as they were structuring them, they were saying them, talking about them, and then writing them in their own notebooks.

Laurie Olsen: Students in a thematic unit are involved in literature in multiple kinds of ways. But there's always one book that they've selected for the narrative and that means it's read out loud. It's orally presented. Students get engaged in retelling the story. And in this case, it's a story about a whale of course, in an ecosystem the San Francisco Bay. And this gave students an opportunity to basically be retelling the story. A really essential skill that's both oral language. It's literary recall. So narrative recall is one of the Daily Five activities in this classroom.

Student 4: Humphrey swims away from his pod and and enters the San Francisco Bay. He swims up the Sacramento River and the river gets narrow and more narrow. He squeezes through the tiny bridge. The coast guard and scientists make a plan.

Laurie Olsen: Another Daily Five center is the found poem. And what this involves is students are looking at both reading that they've been doing and their own writing and picking out words that they really like for whatever reason. It might be a word that's just an interesting word. It might be a concept they like and they take those words and then craft a piece of poetry. That's why it's called found poetry.

Several Students: Endangers pollution maintain ecosystem keystone species.

Laurie Olsen: But by this point in the unit, students have a lot to say and the writing center is simply a place where they can sit down and do writing for their own purposes.

Title Slide: Writing Center

Student 2: Dear Mr. Trump, I was writing the letter because I was wondering why you're drilling pipes because the environment means so much to me.

Laurie Olsen: Today we saw students who are choosing to write to the president, which is something this class has done before. They wrote to the president back in a government unit early in the year and they actually got a response from the president. So now it's a different president and a different unit. It's later in the year. They've got their opinions and they're sitting down to write to our president about what they think needs to happen around protecting the environment, about protecting the ocean, and the ecosystem.

Small Group Guided Reading Lesson (10:19–11:06)

Title Slide: Guided Reading Center

Teacher: Today we're going to be comparing and contrasting "Dolphin Adventure" and "Shark Lady". So, we have the adventures of Eugene Clark. We have "Dolphin Adventure," a true story by Wayne Grover.

Student 5: In "Dolphin Adventures", um Wayne Grover he helped save the dolphin.

Student 4: And Eugene Clark researched sharks.

Teacher: Can we go back to page 49 and use some details about how he saved the dolphin?

Laurie Olsen: In the guided reading center, what we saw again was that compare and contrast language that just flows throughout the entire theme as the language function. And the working with a graphic organizer, a good old Venn diagram, where the students were comparing the two texts. We do see that same graphic organizer, that same compare and contrast focus, throughout the day, in all curriculum areas, in many other contexts as well.

Students Engaging in the Lessons (11:07–12:32)

Teacher: We're going to compare and contrast our shapes today using our compare and contrast sentence frames.

Laurie Olsen: The math lesson today in this classroom is a good example of taking that language function of compare and contrast and applying it into math context.

Student 4: Shape W and shape R are similar because they both are polygons.

Laurie Olsen: So, it was definitely a math lesson. It's not that it became a language arts lesson. But what they were doing was comparing and contrasting the polygons and the shapes and really using the language of that to talk about these mathematical concepts.

Teacher: The last couple days we've been working on our literature study and we've been focusing on "Rachel Carson and Her Book That Changed the World". And we've also been reading about "Olivia's Birds" by Olivia Bowler.

Laurie Olsen: The literature study the entire class was doing together is also two biographical accounts. And so, the students are being immersed in a genre but they're doing it at the reading level they need to be to really move them ahead as readers.

Teacher: How did they love the environment? What did they love about the environment? Why don't we turn and talk to our partner? Tell them how Olivia and Rachel are different.

Student 3: Rachel Carson and Olivia Bowler are different because Rachel Carson stopped pollution and Olivia Bowler saved the birds.

Designated ELD Small Group Instruction (12:33–13:29)

Laurie Olsen: So, while most of the class went back to their desks to work on writing in their journals and to work on their writing with that detail, the teacher holds a small designated ELD group that she wanted to do more directed work and more supportive work with them about putting together compare and contrast sentences.

Teacher and Small Group: Olivia Bowler and Rachel Carson are similar because they wrote books.

Student 6: How about we put both, both wrote books?

Teacher: Because they both wrote books. You want to add that? What do you guys think?

Small Group: Yeah.

Laurie Olsen: So again, it was still working with the content from the same pieces of literature the rest of the class was doing but with a much heavier level of scaffolding and support as they actually undertook the work of, gee I have these two different thoughts. One is about this author and the other is about this other author. How do I connect those? How do I condense this into a single sentence or a single thought that is a compare and contrast thought?

Students Engaging in the Lessons (13:30–15:01)

Teacher: Okay, so we've been working on our shared research project. We did research on sea turtles and we did research on the seahorse. So today, we are going to present our books to the class.

Laurie Olsen: In a shared research project, the teacher has put together some readings on the topics for the students and she also puts together some links to good videos related to the topic. So videos, other online resources, as well as printed text, become the stuff that they use to really learn.

Student 7: Juvenile sea turtle. Once hatchlings leave the nest they're often not seen again until they return to coastal waters. Also, the juvenile sea turtle is born on the east coast of the U.S. Juvenile sea turtle.

Student 8: You can read our book later or you could watch the video on the QR code.

[Applause]

Students: Fish swim up the river to lakes...

Laurie Olsen: What we see in this classroom is what a powerful thematic integrated unit can do, which is to immerse students in reading and writing and talking to each other. Presenting their ideas. Excited about what they're learning. So excited, some students didn't even want to go to lunch because they wanted to finish their writing. These are students that are turned on by learning, who have literacy skills, that are for their own purposes to write letters to presidents as well as to express what they've learned about sea turtles. It's a wonderful example of engaged, joyful, rigorous learning.

Closing Slide (15:02–15:10)

Title Slide: Special Thanks to Christina Vierra, Parkview Elementary School. Copyright 2017 The Sobrato Family Foundation. All rights reserved. Written permission is required to copy this video. Contact seal@sobrato.org.