Favorite Book of the year

At WBAIS, students make a tough choice: Which book out of nominated ten is the most favorite this year?
Based on 104 responses that we've got last Wednesday, the winners are:

Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows: Harry Potter #7 by J. K. Rowling is leading.

 

 Third place is shared between 

  

Language Diversity Day

In the galaxy of languages, every word is a star.  

To celebrate Language Diversity Day, February 21 2016, the Modern Language Department invites the community to participate in this event by creating stars related to different subject areas and in diverse languages spoken at AIS. Do this during the week of February 15-19. Student creations will be displayed in the library during the following week, which is Library Tech Week. 

You can start by creating a star with the meaning related to a discipline (a celestial body, an athlete, a graphic design, a movie star, etc.) and illustrate it. Add your creativity to express your idea. 

The diverse WBAIS community is invited to create a star and to write the word STAR in their native language.

Grade 5

Library collection of books in other languages

Class Discussions

Discussions is a powerful way to develop academic language, thinking and social skills. Students enjoy class discussions because they learn from hearing other people's opinions, comment and connect what is being said to what they learned in class, draw conclusions about the subject matter. They are actively involved into conversations and learn to show their interest through taking notes, eye contact, smiling, nodding, and body language. Students pose questions, summarize and explain their own ideas and points of view.

Paraphrasing, Summarising and Quoting

Paraphrasing, summarising and quoting are the three ways of presenting someone's ideas and phrases that Middle School students are often struggle with. To help students grasp the difference, Humanities teacher Mr. Sullivan and I, library media specialist conduct a purpose-built class activity.

Before we start a lesson on paraphrasing, summarising and quoting, six grade students are divided by groups. They brainstorm and  share their understanding in front of the class. Other students listen carefully, take notes and ask questions when the presentation is over.

Building an even clarer differentiation between the tools through a dialogue is the next step of student discovery. Students are paired to develop each concept through a conversation. We guide  student discussions by asking open questions.

Below are the results of the class discussions.

Quoting:

What? Quoting is an exact reproduction of spoken or written words. It's usually a short message that

supports and not replaces students' own ideas.
Why? Writers use quoting when the exact wording is the best way to convey a message.
How? The message should not be altered. Quotation marks are used in the beginning and at the end of the message.

Paraphrasing:

What? Paraphrasing is a way to express the original ideas in ones own way by using different words.
Why? It is done to support students' original ideas and/or provide evidence.

How? Paraphrasing doesn't make the original text shorter.
A correct way to paraphrase is

• to read the original text carefully and understand it. 
• Then, identify key words and main ideas and relationships between them as well as the author's attitude toward information you are paraphrasing. 
• When paraphrasing, change the grammar and sentence structure but keywords, main ideas and relationships between them keep the same. 
• Express the attitude the author has to treat the original text, that is confidence, doubt, criticism, or other.

Summarising
What? Summarising is a way to convey main ideas of the original text.
Why? Summarising is used to support main ideas of student writing or provide evidence to prove student thoughts.
How?

• To summarise, read the text, take notes and outline the main ideas. 
• Leave out details and examples.
• Close the text and rewrite notes in your own words.

Resources for ESOL

Wiki Junio
is a collection of resources for literacy teachers. There is a section forESOL teachers as well as a list of non-fiction books for 0-12 Simple English.

Comprehension: Helping ELLs Grasp the Full Picture (Colorin Colorado)

EFL Classroom 2.0 - Ning for ELL teachers - Here you will find resources and ideas published by ELL teachers from around the world.

John's ESL Community - List of Idioms


Skip's Radio Scripts for English Language learners.

25 Great Grammar Poems with Activites.

Literacy in a digital world

An article about 21 century literacy in digital age was published in ReadWriteThink blog. Traci Gardner highlights that literacy skills nowadays are more complicated than just changing formats of texts, from print one to electronic. She write that "it’s not about reading that dog-eared copy of Jane Eyre on some electronic gadget. It’s about a completely re-thought notion of what we read and how we read". Our students read a variety of texts, often not recognizing that some of the documents they read, view or listen are texts. When creating lists of significant texts students use they realize what literacies they need to accquire. Multimedia literacy, once being not necessary to be introduced, now became an essential part of education. Read more about defining reading in digital age on the ReadWriteThink (NCTE) web page.