Blog 8

Blog #8 Sheltered Lesson Strategies

This week’s reading was on sheltered activities. These activities make learning easier and more engaging for ELL students. In essence, it prepares the child to activate schema and helps facilitate their thinking in the new language. The teacher in the video clip provided a variety of different sheltered activities to insure the student’s comprehension during the pre-reading, reading and after-reading phases.

In the pre-reading phase, the teacher introduced vocabulary by introducing key terms that the students will encounter within the reading. The teacher provided pictures and stories to help activate the student’s schema. Using these pre-reading sheltered activities, help ELL students make connections between their native language and English. Sheltered activities also aide the students in making sense of the text. I appreciated that the teacher not only stated the objectives and expectations of the students but that they were written on the board for all the students to see. Students work better when they know what to expect and what the teacher expects from them.

During the reading phase, the teacher helped shelter the activity by stopping frequently throughout the text, asking comprehension questions to the students. She also provided adequate wait time which Hill & Flynn says, “Waiting at least three seconds before accepting responses from students increases the depth of answers”. This proved to be true. Also during this phase, the teacher connected the student’s backgrounds to the text. This will help in the student’s comprehension and retention of the story. Lastly, in the reading phase, the teacher made sure to emphasize the vocabulary words that were introduced in the pre-reading phase. This helped the students connect the pre-reading activity to the reading phase. It will also help them prepare for the after-reading activity.

In the after-reading phase, the teacher provided many comprehension activities for the student s to engage in. Some of the activities included, reviewing and working independently with key vocabulary words and concepts. The teacher also provided the opportunity for reciprocal teaching. Reciprocal teaching involves students summarizing, clarifying and predicting to aide in furthering knowledge and understanding (Hill & Flynn, 2006 p. 68-69). The post it note sheltered activity was of interest to me. The post it notes made reviewing, predicting, altering the predictions and questioning fun for the students.

In conclusion, this video clip was very interesting and brought light to how I can incorporate sheltered activities in my classroom. During the clip, the students were engaged and seemed to enjoy the flow of the lesson. This teacher did a very good job at not only the lesson but with the set up of classroom management. I wish to have witnessed more cooperative learning for the ELL students. I believe that having ELL students work in groups to discuss, learn and teach is an easy and great way to promote learning in the language.

Work Cited:

Hill, J.D. & Flynn, K.M. (2006). Classroom Instruction that Works with English Language Learners. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Alexandria: VA.