Transcript: Grade Two Transfer and Designated ELD

Grade Two Science Transfer and Designated English Language Development: Using Language to Describe

Introductory Slides (00:00–00:25)

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.

Narrator Introduces the Lesson (00:25–01:34)

Heather Skibbins, Sobrato Early Academic Language (SEAL) Training Supervisor: Today we got a chance to be in Erica Monte's second grade classroom. This is a second grade bi-literacy classroom with the 90-10 model here at the site, so the kindergartners are in 90 percent Spanish, 10 percent English, and it goes down by 10 percent, so by second grade, she's 70 percent in Spanish, 30 percent in English.

Student 1: [Singing in Spanish] Propiedades nos ayudan … (Properties help us …)

Students: [Singing in Spanish] Propiedades nos ayudan … (Properties help us …)

Student 1: [Singing in Spanish] … a observer y clasificar. (… to observe and classify.)

Students: [Singing in Spanish] … a observer y clasificar. (… to observe and classify.)

Heather Skibbins: They're working on the Next Generation Science Standards, looking at states of matter and its properties, and how to describe and characterize it. The language function for this unit is the language of description. When working with students and instructing in a bi-literacy model, it's important to use both languages as assets. It's important for students to be able to build knowledge in their strongest language, build in their home language, so the unit is grounded in this case in Spanish.

Teacher Introduces Lesson and Students Work in Pairs (1:35–02:46)

Teacher (Erica Monte): [In Spanish] Entonces Salón 4, ya sabemos que hemos aprendido de las propiedades de materia por mucho tiempo. Primero empezamos con agua. Miren a la pared. Con agua y rocas en español, y después miren adelante, aprendimos de madera en inglés. Pero esta mañana vamos a aprender y usar el lenguaje de descripción en español. (Class number four, now we know about the forms of matter. We started with water, look at the wall. With water and rocks in Spanish, and then, look here, we learned about wood in English. But today we are going to learn and use descriptive language in Spanish.)

Heather Skibbins: In today's lesson in Spanish students each chose a different type of wood, one of the forms of matter that they're studying, and then used a web to describe it, so they had a chance with their partner to use this or a language to practice describing what the different characteristics and properties of wood might be.

Student 2: [In Spanish] La madera blanca es como … es … es … como un perro jugando en la playa.  (The white wood is like, like a dog playing on the beach.)

Student 3: [In Spanish] Las características de ... de ... de madera es que ... es suave. (One characteristic of wood is that it is soft.)

Student 4: [In Spanish, mixed with English] Las características de wood son thick, secas, y grandes. (The characteristics of wood are: thick, dry, and big.)

Students Work Independently (02:47–03:31)

Heather Skibbins: The teacher then passed out some paper and they were independently involved in doing a web. The different color pens allowed the teacher for some assessments, when she got to go back and look through those, around what kind of language her students were using. This is one of those places where we think about our graphic organizers in SEAL of using them Into, Through, and Beyond. The students are comfortable with a web, they know what the language of description is, they know what a simile is, and now they're applying all of that content in an independent setting.

Student 5: [In Spanish] La madera es dura. A veces es mojada y llena de rachas. Es como la piel de un elefante. (The wood is hard, sometimes it is wet, and it is uneven just like an elephant’s skin.)

Bridging Spanish to English (03:32–07:15)

Heather Skibbins: When we talk about transfer, or bridging, we're talking about teaching students about the way in which two languages work—the different language structures and helping them to do that meta-linguistic compare and contrast between the two languages.

Teacher: [In Spanish] Hemos hecho mapas excelentes usando adjetivos, frases de adjetivos, lenguaje de descripción, y vocabulario académico. Hasta, también algunos usaron símiles para describir su madera. Pero hoy, vamos a hablar que cada idioma tiene una forma diferente de describir. Y cada idioma pone las palabras juntas diferentes cuando describimos. También podemos describer… (We have done some excellent maps using adjectives, adjective phrases, descriptive language and academic vocabulary. Some of you used similes to describe the wood. But today we are going to discuss the fact that each language has a different way of describing. And each language puts words together in different ways. We can also describe…)

Students: [In Spanish] Madera delgada (Thin wood)

Teacher: [In Spanish] La podemos describir en diferentes maneras. Puede ser madera plana, madera delgada. Eso es la forma. Podemos describir la textura, que ya sabemos es... (We can describe it in different ways. It can be flat wood, thin wood. That is the way to do it. We can describe the texture, that we already know is...)

Students: [In Spanish] …áspera. (Rough.)

Teacher: [In Spanish] …áspera. Cuando estamos describiendo en español, tenemos primero el sustantivo, y segundo, tenemos los adjetivos. (Rough. When we are describing in Spanish, we put the noun first, and second, we have the adjectives.)

Heather Skibbins: It's very important that the teacher, as a language model, maintains very clear language separation. And so today, Erica, when she put on her scarf, that that signaled to the students, from this point on, I'm going to be speaking in English. You might be referencing this side in Spanish, but I'm going to now maintain the language of instruction.

Teacher: And now we're gonna be studying in English. So, let's take a look at the ways that we can describe wood in English. Let's start with the color. We can say that it is brown wood. So, everyone say "brown wood."

Students: Brown wood.

Teacher: We can describe the form, which is ...everybody.

Students: Flat wood.

Teacher: The weight. Is it heavy? Is it light? So again, here's the noun. Can somebody put this adjective in its correct place? Karen? So, we'll see exactly where it goes. Okay, thank you, Karen. Can we read this everyone?

Students: Light wood.

Teacher: So now... Do you have a question, Diego? Or a comment?

Student 3: If it says “wood brown” it's not going to make sense, but it's going to make sense if you say the wood is brown.

Teacher: Exactly. So, I'm just gonna repeat what Diego said. It just doesn't make sense in English to say “wood brown.” In English we say brown wood. We're gonna do the same thing, but now share a sentence in English. So, can we read this together everyone?

Students: It is brown wood. It is rough wood.

Teacher: The adjective doesn’t go—does it go before or after the noun?

Students: Before.

Teacher: So, can you think of another sentence in English? It is hmm wood.

Student 4: It is brown wood. It is flat wood.

Student 5: Okay. It is rough wood. It is smooth wood. It is soft wood.

Student 1: It is flat wood. It is rough, hard wood.

Student 6: It is flat and... it is... it is flat and brown wood.

Whole Group Designated ELD (07:16–10:36)

Heather Skibbins: In Erica's second grade classroom she has all three levels of English language learners. She has her emerging students, her expanding students, and her bridging students. So, she began her designated ELD lesson with all of the students together. They began by doing two different chants. One was around wood that they'd been learning about in English. The other chant was around the language of description and the different ways and the different purposes that we use language of description.

Teacher: So, everyone, let's do our description chant.

Students: Water can be solid, liquid, or gas. Water has specific properties and mass. It is changed by heating or by cooling and freezing. If you tell its qualities you describe.

Heather Skibbins: After those chants, all of the students came down to the carpet and she began her designated ELD by going over the lesson objectives. In this case, the students were going to, by the end, take two or three sentences and work on condensing them into one rigorous, academic sentence.

Students: The wood is used for carving.

Teacher: If I kept going, it would get kind of boring. If I continue to say the wood is... The wood is... Okay. The wood is... It would just get kind of boring. Especially if I was speaking or writing. So, I'm gonna show you how I can take these two sentences and condense it into one. I'm going to take off the adjective, okay, and we know now that the adjective goes... Does it go before or after the noun? Oh. In English, does it go before or after? It goes before. If it's in English, it goes before, so I'm gonna leave this up here. I might even get rid of it and I'm going to squeeze it into our second sentence. So, I'm going to need to cut and take this apart and now we can see, okay, I might need even to cut a little more. Should we have a period in the middle of a sentence? No, no, that wouldn't be correct. So, I'm just gonna slip that off. We know that the wood is…

Students: …solid.

Teacher: The wood is brown, and the wood is used for houses. So, I'm taking directly from this tree map to come up with the next three sentences. Where are we gonna be putting solid and brown? In this... okay, should I put it right here?

Student 6: The solid brown wood—you take off "the" and then put on solid and brown with the...with the wood,

Student 2: Oh— I think it's solid brown wood...

Teacher: This sentence is just a little different from the first one. Okay, um, when we use two adjectives, we actually need to make a pause by adding a comma after the first adjective. Insert a comma there.

Students Work in Pairs (10:37–12:02)

Teacher: If you are in the ELD group “Solids,” you are gonna walk to your desk and you will have sentence strips to write sentences.

Student 4: The wood is used for carving.

Student 1: Yeah.

Student 4: Okay now... what is the...?

Student 1: The wood is rough. The wood changes when it gets burned.

Student 2: The wood is used for furniture.

Student 7: Yeah.

Student 4: We gonna cut this one because. The wood is used for solid furniture.

Student 1: We need to cut...

Student 4: We have to cut this one—the furniture—and cut this.

Student 1: The...the... tan wood is used for solid furniture.

Student 4: Yeah. Because we're gonna have to cut this one... cut this one... and all of these before we can make a sentence.

Heather Skibbins: When the students had finished constructing their sentences they were instructed to write those in their academic process journal, and some added sketches as well. Some of the students that finished early were then invited to go over to the research center where there is a variety of other materials and objects and to use those same sentence strips to continue to expand on this.

Student 8: This one moves and this… I think it's a little bit liquid and the bubbles are like freeze.

The Teacher Works with a Small Group (12:02–13:56)

Heather Skibbins: The teacher has five students who are emerging students and the rest are expanding and bridging. When she excused the expanding and bridging students to work independently with a partner, she kept with her emerging students. She did the same lesson again, but this time she was providing more of teacher scaffold.

Teacher: Today we are working on condensing two sentences. Okay, let's work on our first sentence. So, you can say the wood is smooth. The wood is rough. Try to think of as many sentences using “the wood is hmm,” and remember, a few days ago we even did a semantic gradient from soft, smooth, furry, woodly, bumpy, rough, and spiky, so there are other words you can use if you want to.

Student 9: This the um wood is like a little bit of bumpy.

Teacher: Okay, can we say “the wood is bumpy”?

Students in Small Group: The wood is bumpy.

Teacher: Anything else Cindy?

Student 5: The wood is... um... rasposa... like.

Teacher: Oh, so how would we say that in English?

Student 9: Um... the wood is rough.

Teacher: Can we say “the wood is rough”?

Students in Small Group: The wood is rough.

Teacher: It might be even like scratchy. Can we say “the wood is scratchy”?

Students in Small Group: The wood is scratchy.

Teacher: Alright, so we can leave the word 'the.' What else are we gonna need here now? Because we're condensing…

Student 9: ... The solid

Teacher: Solid. Andrés, can you cut out the word “solid”? And we again we might need to cut out that period. Okay, so here we go.

Students in Small Group: The solid wood is used for furniture.

Teacher: Okay. And now we know we can switch out any words we want. Instead of “solid,” you can say “the brown wood is used for furniture.”

Final Thoughts (13:57–14:19)

Heather Skibbins: The goal of a bi-literacy program is this high level of academic language in English and Spanish, so we don't want to just move them into English and abandon the Spanish. It's really around keeping those high levels of language, reading, writing, and oral language in both languages.