December Traditions

What holiday traditions does your family celebrate this month? Do you celebrate Hannukuh, Christmas, or something else? We will be discussing them this month.What traditions are the same here in the United States and in your home country? We will use a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast.

Prefixes and Suffixes

We are quickly learning many new words by studying prefixes and suffixes. Mrs. Steinke is hopeful that her students will not disappoint her with their enthusiasm, and will eagerly review all the new words that have reappeared on their pretest. If you are careful you can locate many words in this paragraph that have pre- or suf-fixes. If, for some unknown reason, you are unable to find all of the words, reread the paragraph. For more practice, please visit . Then, Mrs. Steinke can reteach her lesson with more completeness.

Feelings

Please watch this video about a girl who has many feelings about leaving one home and going to another country to make a new home. Did you feel the same way when you came to the United States? Share your thoughts.

ESL Vocabulary

Watch this for another way to teach vocabulary.

December Learning Blitz

Welcome back from a wonderful Thanksgiving break. I hope all of you had plenty of time to eat and spend time with family and friends, as well as be thankful and grateful for all that you have. Now it is time for some serious learning before the next holiday begins, because we have four weeks of school to spend refining our language skills and improve our vocabularies, as well as write descriptively in our journals. It will be lots of fun, with some games along the way.

Reader's Theatre

Check these sites for R.T. Scripts - they are great fun and improve fluency with ESL students:
http://www.aaronshep.com/rt/index.html
http://www.timelessteacherstuff.com/

www.storyplace.org
www.everyculture.com

Thanksgiving

Watch this video.

Thanksgiving

Here is a delightful video presentation of Thanksgiving celebrations from the first ones to the ways we celebrate today.

Temperature and Weather

We are learning how to read and interpret graphs, as well as learn math terminology. Each day for the month of October we recorded the weather. For the past few weeks we have recorded the daily noontime temperature. We created a bar graph with the weather data, and will soon create a plot temperature graph with that information.

Third Graders in ESL

Third grade ESL students in Mrs. Steinke's class are studying a new program called Elements of Reading. The students will learn new vocabulary words in each lesson which they can use in their classroom, or in a variety of ways throughout the day. The program has many wonderful features, including large colorful photographs of the vocabulary words, workbooks with neon colors that are easy to use, and graphic organizers to assist students in acquiring the words and their meanings. Students also get to place a tally next to each vocabulary word that is used in a sentence throughout the week. It's quite interesting to see which words are used more frequently.