Miss Krag read an owl’s book, then she asked to work in partner and come up with few subjects, then with adjectives, or finishers, for example: The black owl has hooked beaks.
Miss Krag is promoting the use of uncommon vocabulary words. A more complete sentence is “the true owl has tufts on its head,” or “the owls have soft feathers and sharp talons to catch their pray. This activity is all about challenging children to think, and to communicate using English grammar correct. After finishing the sentence, they are analyzing all the grammar pieces. Then they need to sit at their desks and write the sentences down, and come up with other new ones.
From this experience I learned that the program changed positively from six years ago, more structured, and I also noticed that it also depends from the teacher knowledge and hard work to connect the core knowledge to the 4-hour block. Miss Krag said that she uses dices to connect math in creating sentences while rolling the dice. My advice to teachers is to learn Spanish before teaching ELL, to be able to communicate to children or families that don’t know English