Beautiful Things - Roses are Red

What do you see?

How does it smell?
How does it feel?

 

A student surprised me this Valentine's Day with a rose!
What a great teaching gift to work on describing things!

 

Follow up with colour and rhyming practice:

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

Sugar is sweet,

and so are _______.

Roses are red,

Violets are grey,

When I am with you,

I have a nice ________.

Roses are red,

Violets are plaid,

When we are apart,

I feel _________.

Outcomes: express spoken and written descriptions, fill in initial consonant sound in rhyming word groups

Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!

Make your own snowflakes using templates!

http://funschool.kaboose.com/fun-blaster/winter/printables/winter-snowflake-designs.html 

Great for practice following directions, folding paper accurately, using scissors, and being creative!

Great for multilevel groups.

There were a few originals among the templates. Can you spot them?

Cranberry Sauce

Although this is a seasonal dish, I had never made cranberry sauce in my life before. And, neither had my students. For most of them, they had not seen or tasted a cranberry before. We made this sauce from a recipe from the LINC 4 Activities: http://www.moresettlement.org/LINC1-4/LINC4/LINC_4_Classroom_Activities.pdf page 477 Cranberries, A North American Superfruit. 

To sample the sauce, I brought in some halal cheese (no rennet or pepsin) and some crackers. 

As we went through all the steps in the recipe, we described everything using the five senses. This included sampling a raw cranberry and a teaspoon full of pure maple syrup. Yum, yum! This builds concrete experience with the foods that many Canadians take for granted. It was also quite lovely to have this time out of the regular classroom and just to chat while each step was being completed. I will certainly try to do some more recipes in my class in the future. 

Outcomes: reads and understands short instructions, read and understand formatted texts, measure ingredients accurately, give simple descriptions of simple objects

Guess the image

A special thanks to my creative colleague, B.B.,  for sharing this idea with us. She found it at http://www.greatgroupgames.com/zoom-in-game-thanksgiving.htm! She set up several of these sequential photos based on thematic words. Great for including horticulturally related items such as foods. All the food item vocabulary can be pre-taught with realia in class, and followed up by making some delicious recipes or sampling some apple cider.

Thanksgiving Tree

Beautiful Things - Grapes

My next door neighbours have a backyard patio that is fully shaded by trellised grapevines. Green and purple concord grapes. I often peek at them through the lattice at the top of our fence. I often breathe in the sweet, fragrant scent of them as the wind flows through our bathroom window.

The questions for my Phase 2 students:

1. How do they smell?

2. How do they feel?

3. What do you see?

4. How do they taste?

In groups, the students explored the grapes and came up with some sentences.

Aloe, baby!

Baby aloe plants!

The plant pictured here is quite a prolific little mama! It was repotted a few months ago and has now produced 4 off-shoots. Soon it will be time to divide the babies out. What a great project for an ESL Literacy class.

Activities

1. Discuss the plant using the 5 senses. How does it look? How does it feel? How does it smell?

2. Discuss the medicinal uses of this plant. Is it from the students' countries? Break a piece off and discuss some more

3. Outline step by step the procedure for dividing the plants. Follow the instructions as a class. Take photos along the way. Print the photos and have the students tell you what happened at each step. Read. Copy. Cut and sequence the sentences. Match the sentences to the photos. Create a cloze exercise in which students can listen and write from memory or by copying from a word bank.

4. Students take turns presenting a narrative on what they did in this activity.

5. Track the growth of the new plants in class. Create a chart to write the date and measurement weekly or monthly.