Have a wonderful summer break!

Congratulations to all students for having been so hard-working and resilient during the academic year 2020-2021! We hope you all have a well-deserved and restful summer holiday.

The EAL team

Animals and their Habitats

Children in the Early Years have been  learning all about animals and their habitats.  They played many sorting games, picking animals and placing them where they belong.  They practised speaking, using the sentence frames, "This is a/an (animal).  It lives in the (habitat)." 

Some of the animals the children had to identify.

The children gave information about the animals and their surroundings.  Here is what they said:

Varuna:  Armadillo -- "He hides in his self."

David:  "I know animal, not monkey, it swings in the vines.  In Czech it is lenochod (sloth)."

Mete:  Scorpion -- "It stings with the tail'"

Yasmine: Vines -- "They are for monkeys so they can swing."

The children shared what they know about the different habitats the animals live in.

Marina:  "In the jungle you find trees."

Isidro:  "The jungle have [has] sticky air."

Julia:  "In the jungle it's hot, it rains.  It's really green."

Maxime:  "In the savannah the grass is high so the animals can hide."

Kanaru:  "In [the] savannah, grass is everywhere, but not in [the] desert,"

David:  "In the polar lands, snow makes ice and the ice makes the water cold."

Masha:  "The polar lands is cold because the snow is there."

Yasmine:  "In the desert, it's dry, sun comes out, and it doesn't rain."

Arsène:  "In the night,  when the sun is not here it becomes cold (in the desert)."

Max:  "In the desert, they have spiky trees (cactus)."

Jiho:  "The ocean has a lot of water."

Roulin:  "The ocean is deep water."

Marcel:  "The ocean in my country is very hot."

When asked in which habitat they preferred to live, here are some of their very interesting responses: 

Julia:  "I want to live in jungle because I want to play with the animals.  My favourite is tiger, but I don't like frogs because it's slimy!  Yuck!"

Soline:  "I want to live in the water because I love to swim.  I want to be a dolphin!"

João:  " I'll be a shark in the ocean because no one can get me."

Rafaela:  "I want to live in the jungle because I like to swing [on the vines] like a monkey."

Greta:  "I want to live in the polar lands because there is huskies.  I want to be a husky!"

Fabian:  "I want to live in the ocean because I could see a lot of fish.  I want to be the biggest octopus."

Lucie:  "I want to live in the ocean.  I want to swim under the sea because I want to be a mermaid!"

Jason:  "I like in the desert because it [it's] really hot.  I really like to go to a warm place."

It seems like the ocean is a popular choice of habitat.  However,  many may agree with Jason that a warm place is what we all need.   How about you, where would you like to live?

Why do we include students' home languages in education? by Tan Huynh

Y5 Bilingual Writing: Ancient Roman Artefacts

By providing instruction in students' home languages, multilingual education positions multilingual students to be on an equal footing to their peers. Educational equity supports three key principles of

multilingualism: identity, structuring for integration and additive bilingualism.

In our EAL lessons, our students are actively encouraged to tap into their home languages to access new  content or understand more clearly how their language compares to English. Working with languages side-by-side helps our multilingual students to become more accurate language users in all of their languages. 

Please read the following blog post from EAL expert Tan Huynh to find out more about the benefits of using home languages at school.

Y6: Home Language River Brochures

 Our Year 6 students recently completed an in-depth home language task where they researched and created a river brochure. This river was either from their home country or it was a river they were very interested in learning about. 

Students explored sub-topics such as the river's geography, its natural environment and the kinds of activities that took place along the river's banks or in its waters. 

Beautifully presented, this extended home language project enabled Year 6 students to develop their academic home language to higher levels. In addition, it increased their general knowledge of river features. Well done Year 6! This is a wonderful example of a curriculum task flipped into home languages!

Creating Acrostic Poems

 A recent writing workshop unit in Year 3 found us creating acrostic poems, and in doing so explored sentence structure through colour coded examples. Word types like adjectives and adverbs were also a focus. Here we learnt how to use online resources like the Kids Thesaurus to find synonyms for everyday words we regularly use. With a clear example generating a fun discussion, students were very quick and eager to build phrases and clauses about themselves. We are learning to become powerful users of language whilst having a lot of laughs along the way.

 

Building Sentences

In Year 4 Fun Club, we have worked on building sentences. We can make simple sentences or even longer sentences. Did you know sentences have many different parts? 

To help us build sentences, we thought of the who, what, where and when. The colour coding of the cards definitely made building sentences easy for us! 

After making our sentences, we translated them into our home languages and thought how they were similar and/or different from English sentences. 

How is the sentence structure like in your home language(s)?

Is it different than English? Or is it similar? 

Continents and its habitats

 Do all continents have the same kind of habitat?

EY 1 children are learning how to be real scientists and researchers. They are looking 👀 at our world 🌎 and learning about its habitats... its plants 🌴, flowers 🌹, animals 🐠 and how they depend on each other.

One of the questions our scientists had to answer this week was:

They also watched a video about the world's largest rainforest, the Amazon. EY 1 children were amazed to know that our rainforests are home to over half of the world's plant and animal species! 

Finally, the children sorted animals according to their habitats and named them in their home language!

Russian

Romanian

Italian      

Hungarian

Swedish