Happy Fall!!

 

Our ELL groups started meeting this past week and it is wonderful to see and work with everyone again!

 

The following is a brief explanation of the schedule for when the students will be working with us:

 

9:15-9:55: Second grade students (Miss Lundeen- pull out small groups alternating MWF and T&TH)

10:00-10:45: Kindergarten students (Miss Lundeen- pushing into classes and rotating through each class during the week)

10:50-11:30: Fifth grade students (Miss Lundeen pushing in and pull out 5B)

11:50-12:20 (Miss Lundeen pull out 1st grade students alternating throughout the week)

12:25-1:00: (Miss Lundeen pull out lower level Kindergarten students)

2:30-3:20: (Miss Lundeen pull out newcomer students)

 

12:45-1:15 (Mrs. Howard push into 3BA)

1:20-1:50 (Mrs. Howard pullout students from 3K and 3P for small group)

2:00-2:30 (Mrs. Howard pull out 3BA and 3A students)

2:30-3:00 (Mrs. Howard push into Kindergarten M-TH)

 

12:40-1:30: Second Grade (Mrs. Krishnan push into 2BR for Math)

1:40-2:45 (Mrs. Krishnan push into 4th grade classes)

2:45-3:20 (Mrs. Krishnan pull out 4th grade students for small group)

 

Next week we will be testing 2nd and 5th graders for the CoGat test from 9:30-10:30 Monday-Wednesday, therefore our ELL morning groups will not be meeting. 

 

As always, please contact me with any questions. Enjoy the fall weather :)

 

Miss Lundeen



 

Welcome to the 2012-2013 school year :)

I am very excited to begin this school year and work will all of our wonderful ELL students again. I have a few updates to share:

- We have two additional part time ELL teachers coming from other schools to assist our ever-growing English language learner population. Mrs. Krishnan will be coming over part time from Kendall Elementary and Mrs. Howard will be coming from Scullen Middle School in the afternoons.

- Mrs. Karra will be working this year with our Telugu students in various classrooms.

We are in the midst of organizing the number of students in the ELL program and working out our schedule for each grade level to begin seeing our students. Paperwork for all ELL students was sent home on Friday September 7. Feel free to contact me with any questions that you have in regards to the program.

We will be having our ELL parent night on Thursday 9/13 from 6:00 to 6:30 before curriculum night in Room 107. We hope that you can attend a brief informational meeting to receive a description of the program, meet the ELL teachers, see the classroom and ask any questions that you may have!

We look forward to meeting all of you and working with your children this year!

 

Miss Lundeen

It's hard to believe that the month of May is here and the school year is slowly coming to a close!

The students in ELL have been working this week on doing various cooperative activities and even conducting research to present to others in our group.

Kindergarten has been working on describing their favorite places by first drawing and labeling a picture with details and then forming complete sentences to describe what can be seen and done at their favorite place. These writing pieces turned out fantastic and will be a great addition to their journals from throughout the school year :).

Mrs. Krishnan and I pushed into the first grade classrooms to assist with their stories that were published by the first grade parents. These stories were extremely creative and it was very interesting to see their ideas come to life!

Second grade is reading and discussing national geographic books on animal life cycles to tie into their mealworm and life cycle unit. The past few days, we have been reviewing vocabulary words that connect to this unit and read various books to generate ideas on how all animals on Earth go through a life cycle. Next week, the students will be researching an animal and then describing their life cycle findings and facts to the rest of the group!

Third grade completed a jigsaw activity this week with vocabulary words from the Boomtown story that they are reading in class. Each student was placed on a color team and was responsible for researching information on their word, becoming an "expert" on the word from the story, discussing the word with a partner from the other color team, and teaching the definition (in his or her own words) and providing examples to his or her team members. The teams are working on creating a descriptive poster that showcases their knowledge of these words. Luckily, many of these words tie into their migration unit in social studies as well :)!

Fourth grade is beginning their unit on the West region. This week, the students were divided into pairs to compare and contrast the West region with the previously studied Northeast region using a venn diagram. All students used national geographic materials to locate interesting facts about both regions to find their simliarities and differences. Next week, the students will be completing a foldable that will highlight some key facts that we will discover about the West!

With Mrs. Bennick's flex group, fifth grade observed two stories that involved the work of Barbara Cooney including Miss Rumphius and Ox Cart Man. The students completed reading activities for Miss Rumphius and then discussed the differences between the 19th century and today for the Ox Cart Man.

Tomorrow and Monday will be CBM testing, therefore there will be no ELL services on those days. Mrs. Krishnan and I will be putting together a schedule to begin screening the incoming Kindergarten students beginning on May 21st, therefore ELL classes will end on May 18th.

As always, if there are any questions, please feel free to contact me :)

Miss Lundeen

Happy Earth Day!

This week in ELL we have many different assemblies and events going on!
Second grade has their musical tomorrow morning and Thursday we have an assembly to celebrate Earth Day :)

Throughout the week, our ELL groups will be doing different activities to celebrate going GREEN.

Kindergarten will be brainstorming ways that we can keep the Earth clean. We will be discussing these different ways through cooperative activities and then writing about all of the ways that we can help keep the Earth clean.

First grade has been studying all about insects and now we will be learning how we can take care of those insects as well to help protect the Earth. We sang a song and wrote about Going Green on Friday that can be found on havefunteaching.com!  "We're going green and keeping the Earth CLEAN!"

Second grade will be learning about the oceans and discussing ways that we can protect our oceans of the world.

Third grade read a story that they are familiar with since they studied the author Chris Van Allsburg. We read the story Just a Dream and identified what the world would be like in the future if we don't protect it.

Fourth grade is doing a similar activity as third grade with a focus on identifying what the world would look like in the future if we continue our current actions and polluting the Earth. We have been working on past, present, and future tenses, so we will be practicing using sentences that represent events in the future (I will, It will probably..., etc.) 

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me :)
Miss Lundeen

This week in ELL!

Hopefully everyone had a great long weekend! Our ELL groups have been working hard in our class to practice furthering our understanding of different skills and English vocabulary.

In Kindergarten, we are discussing different places in our community. We identified that houses, our favorite restaurants, parks, hospitals, etc are all places that exist in our community. Each student created a building that they included later on in our Kindergarten ELL community! 

First graders have been discussing the ways that we can take care of our bodies. We have read stories, sung songs and read poems, and are now using our special sequencing words (first, next, then, last) to create a writing piece that describes the different things that we all can do to take care of our bodies!

Second graders are identifying the different landforms that exist on our Earth. We created motions that represent different landforms and have been working on matching descriptions of each landform with their pictures doing a Mix, Freeze, Match activity. We will continue our study of Geography by working with the terms continent and ocean and completing different activities to represent these physical features.

Third grade is discussing the terms immigration and migration. We have identified which students in our ELL group are immigrants and which students are not immigrants and were born in the United States. We have found that there are six students in our group that are immigrants! Later this week, we will be comparing the terms immigration and migration and identifying examples of each.

Fourth graders are continuing our discussion on the different steps included in the scientific method. We have been talking about what each step looks like and what we do during each step. We will also be practicing using these words by performing different experiments that allow us to correctly state a hypothesis and reflect on and revise our predictions for what will happen.

As a side project, we have also been comparing and contrasting currency from different countries. So far, we have compared the different forms of currency from the United States, Australia, India, Saudi Arabia, Italy and Korea! I'd like to thank our fourth grade parents for helping their children find money from other countries so that we can look at it in our ELL class! :)

This week in ELL

After a long week of ISAT testing for our 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students, we are finally getting back to our normal routine!

Kindergarten has been attending ELL in smaller group sessions for 30 minutes in the afternoons. This week is "W" week and our focus is Who, What, Where, When. The main "W's" in terms of reading and describing stories.

First grade is learning about bones and comparing our bodies to the environment around us. We are using measurement vocabulary terms such as taller, shorter, bigger, smaller and analyzing how we can keep our bodies healthy.

Second grade is beginning a unit on economy. This week, we are creating vocabulary flip books that define keywords such as income, economy, goods, services, producers, consumers. The objective of our unit will be to use this academic vocabulary and use the words in a realistic context. They will create original sentences and pictures using the words.

Third grade is beginning a unit on the moon. This week, we are looking at the 8 different phases of the moon and understanding the keywords that are associated with the unit such as phase, waning, waxing, gibbous, and crescent. The students will identify the appropriate phases throughout the entire moon cycle.

Fourth grade is working on the Southwest Unit. They are working in pairs to "reciprocal teach" different elements of the Southwest such as Economy, Culture, History, and Geography. Each group will be responsible to read, ask questions, identify difficult parts in the text, summarize and make predictions as they present to the rest of the group to teach their topic!

Fifth Grade's flex group with Mrs. Bennick is working with Aesop's fables and understanding morals or lessons. We will be doing a variety of activities this week relating to morals.

The Book Fair at the May Watts library is also occurring this week and will also be open at the fun fair this Saturday from 11-3. Be sure to stop by!

That will wrap up our week this week! Next week will be a shorter day with no school on Tuesday and a half day on Friday, all before Spring Break :)

As always, be sure to contact me with any questions!
Miss Lundeen

ELL Resumes!

Since ACCESS testing is finally complete, we are finally able to get back to our usual ELL routine!

We have had some minor group changes that will allow for more direct instruction to smaller group sizes. So far, this has proven to be a positive transition!

Our Kindergarten group now meets at the end of the day in smaller group setting. This week, we have been reinforcing beginning, middle and end sequencing skills. We connected sequencing stories to sequencing events in our school day.

First graders have been practicing making comparisons between penguins and other animals. They wrote characteristics that were the same and different between penguins and another animal. After completing their writing piece, the students completed their mix pair share activity to discuss their responses with others.

Our second grade group is discussing buoyancy and comparing objects that sink and float. The key element of our discussion has been describing why objects will sink and why they float. Our focus skill for the week is forming predictions and testing those predictions to determine if they are correct.

Third, fourth, and fifth graders are working on ISAT preparation activities. Our main focus in third and fourth grade includes homonyms, homophones, antonyms and synonyms, cause and effect and identifying the main idea in various reading materials. We are doing various cooperative activities that allow them to practice these skills.

Monday is Presidents Day and Tuesday is parent teacher conferences from 1-8. I will be available to meet with various parents of students throughout the day. Enjoy the long weekend :)

Miss Lundeen