Let's give our new teaching assistant (Auxiliar de Conversación), Ms. Monica de la Garza, a warm welcome! She is from the US and she has joined our brand new #alqareading Literary Circle which is going to be implemented when Ms. de la Garza is with us in our literacy lessons, within the framework of our #alqareading book club. Whereas our #alqareading book club may focus more on reading for pleasure, discussing our chosen books in a recreational and creative manner, connecting it to certain aspects of the integrated curriculum subjects and establishing links to geographical and historical contexts; on the other hand, in our #alqareading Literary Circle we aim at delving deeper into literary analysis, exploring themes, characters, writing styles, in a more structured way.
In Year 4 she led a structured, in-depth discussion on different aspects of #Moxie, encouraging our students to explore Moxie's nuances. Indeed, today's co-teaching lesson in Year 4 was divided into two different sections; first, our brand new Literary circle and, second, a short burst writing activity for our #alqareading book club.
So, firstly, we started out our brand new #alqareading Literary Circle with the help of our Language Assistant, Ms. De la Garza asking students questions about Moxie and encouraging them to talk and to think through the ‘possibilities’ the book offers for discussion. For instance, have they ever experienced something similar to what the protagonist is going through?
During that long Circular conversation which involved our coordinator and Year 4 Literacy teacher, Raquel García Hernández, our teaching assistant Ms. Mónica de la Garza and our literacy teacher and adviser, Marina Hurtado, many topics connected to the main theme explored so far in Moxie arose.
Our Literacy adviser, Marina Hurtado, having planned a short writing task, jotted down key vocabulary from the talks in the whiteboard so as to encourage our students to use that and to make the vocabulary more relevant topic-wise in their free writing.
Secondly, we used Short Burst Writing which is a technique or an activity we had learnt earlier this month in the Talk For Writing training sessions whereby a topic is used as a starting point to encourage our students to write independently, taking the writing in their own direction. This writing took around 10 minutes to complete.
Then, there was a second activity to perform: collaborative writing.
Step 0 - Teacher-led: Gathering vocabulary and encouraging our students to use it so as to extend theirs where possible and to take their level to the extra mile.
Step 1 – Individual task: free writing. The students had around ten minutes to write.
Step 2 – Exchanging their text with their classmate and reading through it.
Step 3 – Deciding together what they should write when fusing the two text into a richer, coherent and cohesive level – The use of cohesive devices (connectors, etc.) was encouraged.
Step 4 – Raquel and Marina encouraged our students to write a full text collaboratively using the best possible language resources. Coherence was a challenge.
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