EAL students have been coming up with various ideas on what EAL should stand for. Evil and Laughing. Enthusiastic and Loud. Exceptionally Artful Lessons. Personally, I think enthusiastic, adaptable and legendary make up the best name to describe our students and therefore, the programme.
Year 2 students have been practising vocabulary related to various parts of their faces. While drawing and labelling are good ways to review this vocabulary, why not throw in a fun game of Simon Says? Better yet, students decided they wanted to be the teacher and lead the game, giving even the quietest of children the chance to shout out loud! They had fun making sentences and subsequently using that vocabulary to create interview questions to figure out who was feeling what that day.
Year 4 decided that practising their reading skills and writing skills was not sufficiently motivational to participate in the lesson, they needed some physical exertion thrown into the mix. They had a blast with our Running Dictation activity as they worked in pairs to derive the answers from the text and retold the answers to their partners to be written down. To check how well each team completed the descriptions of their mythical creatures, our student-teachers led the class in a game of Draw This!, describing their creatures using noun phrases.
Year 5 have been learning new vocabulary and created puzzles for each other to solve. Students used their iPads to research the synonyms and antonyms of each word and used them in sentences. We had a blast trying to figure out what their original words were, especially when all we had were the antonyms! Word association provided them a new way of looking at and remembering our new vocabulary.
Practising language doesn’t have to be drab and dull. Playing games, talking with their friends and listening to music are just some of the ways that students of all ages can absorb that new language.
Head of EAL
