“ Linguistically Responsive Teaching Practices” on page 10 shows what these approaches looked like in Ms. Gutiérrez’ s and Ms. Anna’ s classroom.
Modeled Writing Example
Writing About the Experience
It is not by accident that oral language permeates all aspects of the nature-based biliteracy sequence. A direct experience in nature that involves the senses inevitably creates a story that children will want to share.
To build on children’ s interests, understandings, and desires to communicate what they know, Phase 2 continues with and extends partner-based conversations that help all learners to summarize, retell, explain, and describe their experiences. During this time, children translanguage, or use their full linguistic repertoire to communicate with each other. This includes mixing languages and incorporating other modes of communication, such as gestures and drawings.
Besides promoting oral language development, children’ s participation in partner-based conversations encourages them to decontextualize their language, describing experiences that occurred outside of the present moment( in this case, the past), thereby fostering narrative skills and deeper linguistic competence. In other words, they verbally represent their experiences as their access to concrete objects and direct experiences is gradually removed. These conversations also create a bridge between referents, or objects and their symbols.
At this point, children’ s talk becomes a rehearsal for writing( Escamilla et al. 2014). Acting as scribes, teachers can pose questions, capture children’ s responses, and model writing with purpose as they produce conventionally written pieces reflective of children’ s verbally produced accounts of their experiences. They can monitor and scaffold with content area objectives as well.
For example, when the children in Ms. Gutiérrez’ s classroom returned from their outdoor exploration, she asked them to sit on the carpet next to their partners. Standing by an easel with paper attached to it and leading the discussion in Spanish, she asked,“ What did we do in the forest today? What did we learn about the tree as a source of life and resources?” After writing a
The Trees in Our Forest: Who Lives There?
Today, we visited the trees in the forest behind our school. We collected twigs, seeds, and leaves and learned that many animals use it as a resource or live on it. Some birds, for example, use twigs and other small parts to build nests on the tree’ s branches. We spotted two nests near the tree’ s canopy!
title that aligned with her question(“ The Trees in Our Forest: Who Lives There?”), she provided the sentence stem“ Today, we visited a tree and collected.”
As children talked, Ms. Gutiérrez began to capture their experiences in writing, adhering to Spanish as indicated in the language allocation plan. Throughout the year, she used a modeled writing approach to illustrate the conventions of writing— such as directionality and spacing( Bingham et al. 2023)— while incorporating ideas that emerged from children’ s conversations( see“ Modeled Writing Example” above). Once the paragraph was completed, Ms. Gutiérrez read each sentence, often stopping to show the real item( twigs, seeds) when it was mentioned in the narrative.
To enhance language support during Phase 2, Ms. Anna began populating a word wall with key vocabulary along with the image of the word when possible. As she heard children use words like leaves, sticks, and resources, she reminded them that this vocabulary was important to use and keep in mind as they engaged in
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