ISM Spotlight – All About Casablanca in Three Languages

This year I am the luckiest teacher in the world. I get to teach at the best school ever – International School of Morocco, with some of the best, most creative, teachers ever. Each time I walk into someone else’s classroom, I get inspired and we just seem to spiral great teaching ideas off of each other. It’s a wonderful place to teach, and since we are all collaborating, it’s a wonderful place for our kids to learn – a teacher’s dream, right? I have tried and tried to convince the other teachers to create blogs of their own to spotlight and share some of their amazing ideas, but everyone is super busy. Instead, they have each agreed to let me spotlight some of their ideas right here on Raki’s Rad Resources. So, each Friday night, I will be posting an ISM Spotlight.

Tonight I want to show you a collaborative project that was worked on in 3 languages.  Our Year 1/ Year 2 (Kindergarten & 1st grade) teacher Courtney Nassar did a unit on “Our City – Casablanca”.  Ms. Nassar guided the students through an inquiry discovery unit on the people and places that make up a city, including creating these collage letters, graphing the languages spoken, charting the things you can see, hear and feel in the city and going on a field trip to a variety of places around the city including the post office, the bakery and the bank.

 

Her students were lucky enough to work on the concepts of who and what made up their city in English, French and Arabic.  Mr. Raki, our Arabic teacher, worked on the letters that are used to spell out Casablanca in Arabic.  In Arabic, we say “Dar Beida”, which literally translates into white house – just like Casablanca does. 

 In French, Madame Gaelle worked with the kids to create a poster of French words about Casablanca that go all the way from A – Z.  The students not only brainstormed the words, they also colored the letters and wrote the words to create the poster.

 

 

 

 

 

Stop by next week to find out what’s going on at ISM.

ISM Spotlight – Play Dough Letters in Arabic

This year I am the luckiest teacher in the world. I get to teach at the best school ever – International School of Morocco, with some of the best, most creative, teachers ever. Each time I walk into someone else’s classroom, I get inspired and we just seem to spiral great teaching ideas off of each other. It’s a wonderful place to teach, and since we are all collaborating, it’s a wonderful place for our kids to learn – a teacher’s dream, right? I have tried and tried to convince the other teachers to create blogs of their own to spotlight and share some of their amazing ideas, but everyone is super busy. Instead, they have each agreed to let me spotlight some of their ideas right here on Raki’s Rad Resources. So, each Friday night, I will be posting an ISM Spotlight.

This week, we are taking a sneak peek into the Arabic Language Learners class, taught by Khalil Raki, who just happens to be my husband – :) .  He also teaches right “next door” to me, so I popped in the other day to borrow some tape and saw this:

 

 

Three little girls who do not speak, read or write Arabic were creating the Arabic Alphabet with Play Dough.  Better than that, they could tell me the names and sounds of each of the letters they were making.  How cool!

With these same students, Mr. Raki has been working on Arabic greetings, like As-salem Awalykom and Ma’Salema.  For these greetings, he created a whole Arabic Greetings Packet and had them color and cut out the greetings, spelled in Arabic letters.  Then, they matched the greetings to the same word spelled out phonetically in the English alphabet that they are used to seeing. 

     

In addition to teaching Arabic Language Learners, Mr. Raki also teachings Arabic Native Speakers, who speak Arabic at home, and have a base in Arabic literacy.  With these students, Mr. Raki works on all of the same concepts we are working on in class, including math and literacy.  He also places educational videos for them on Edmodo and allows them to explore those concepts we are teaching in Science and Social Studies further in Arabic.

Come back next week for more of the awesome stuff that is happening at the International School of Morocco.

 

 

ISM Spotlight–Lego Letters

This year I am the luckiest teacher in the world. I get to teach at the best school ever – International School of Morocco, with some of the best, most creative, teachers ever. Each time I walk into someone else’s classroom, I get inspired and we just seem to spiral great teaching ideas off of each other. It’s a wonderful place to teach, and since we are all collaborating, it’s a wonderful place for our kids to learn – a teacher’s dream, right? I have tried and tried to convince the other teachers to create blogs of their own to spotlight and share some of their amazing ideas, but everyone is super busy. Instead, they have each agreed to let me spotlight some of their ideas right here on Raki’s Rad Resources. So, each Friday night, I will be posting an ISM Spotlight.

This week, we are spotlighting Khalil Raki, our Arabic teacher.  Mr. Raki (who is also my husband – hence the name coincidence) teaches Arabic to all of the students, from Pre-K through 4th grade.  At ISM, we have a mixture of native Arabic speakers and non-native Arabic speakers, as well as a few varieties in the middle! 

One of the things that our Arabic students are learning is how to connect letters to make words.  In Arabic, each letter has 3 possible ways that it can look, depending on where it is placed in the letter.  Here is an example, using the letter “bah”, which makes the same sound as B would in English.

As a way to help the students work on recognizing these letters and reading words – Mr. Raki pulled out the legos!  He used masking tape to add the correct possibilities to the legos and the students use the legos to make words.  Then, they sort out whether the words they’ve made make sense, or if they are non-sensical.

Mr. Raki’s favorite part is that with just a few turns of the legos, he can turn a non-sense word into a true Arabic word and keep on building vocabulary.  (Just for clarification, but of these pictures show real Arabic words. )

 

Come back next Friday to find out what the other ISM teachers are up to.

Do You Speak Another Language?

My class consists of 20 students, of which only 1 speaks English only in his household, and even he began his life in a bilingual environment. The other 18 speak at least one, if not two other languages in their homes, and go to school in English, although they don’t live in an English speaking country. Due to my unique teaching position, I have had some readers ask for tips on teaching English Language Learners. Here’s this week’s Tuesday TESOL Teaching Tip:

ELL Teaching Tip #25: Learn Another Language

A few weeks ago, we talked about the difference between being able to sympathize with your students and being able to empathize with them in regards to culture shock.  Experiencing a culture outside of your own is something you can never understand from reading about it or hearing about it, it is something you must experience first hand. 
Being bilingual is another concept that you can never understand from reading about it or hearing about it.  I know that most of us do not have enough time to learn another language to the point of becoming fully bilingual, but I still suggest to anyone teaching English Language Learners to try and learn at least some of another language.  The more you learn, the more you will understand how your students feel, and the most you will be able to appreciate the positives and negatives of being bilingual.
For the past year, since I moved to Morocco, I have been working on learning Arabic and French.  Even though I have been learning for a year, I am far from bilingual (especially since I spend the majority of my time in English and not Arabic or French).  However, I have learned enough Arabic and French to:
1.  be able to communicate my basic needs, and often simple thoughts
2.  know that there is so much I’d like to say in, but I don’t have the words to express myself yet
3.  have the word I am looking for pop into my head in Arabic or French before English
4.  get frustrated by how slow I am learning
5.  get excited by having 3 different ways to explain one item or event
6.  tune out my teacher and others who are speaking to me because I’m only understanding about one word out of ten.

In order to better understand how your students feel when they are learning English in your room, I highly suggest learning another language.  Buy a Rosetta Stone program, take classes, find a tutor, but take the time to see how it truly feels to be a language learner.  I promise you will look at your English Language Learners in a whole new way.
I’d love to hear from you – Please leave me a comment and let us know - Have you learned another language?  Are you bilingual?  How does it impact how you teach in the classroom?


Do you enjoy the weekly TESOL Teaching Tips? Would you like to view an hour long presentation on this topic? I recently presented on Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners at the Everything’s Intermediate Expo. Now you can grab the presentation for just $4.95 from Teacher’s Notebook.


Find more TESOL Teaching Tips here, and come back every Tuesday for a new tip!