L1-L2 project Thing #15

Bob is also helping with another project for L1-L2 students. They just completed a science experiment with Wisconsin Fast Plants. It was a great experiment for ELL students, with a many observations and experiments. To conclude the project and provide an assessment I am having the students put some of the data into a spreadsheet then from there into a PowerPoint presentation with pictures and descriptions.

I have found the two classes to be very different in their capability. Scaling the task properly has been a greater challenge than I expected.

Bob has been a great help. The task of getting even a small class such as these onto a computer and clear on the task would have been impossible without him.

It is difficult to decide what informational elements to add to the presentation. I am thinking that it would be best for them to pull a clip down from Unitedstreaming relevant to growing plants or cycles and drop it in. But Powerpoint can get fussy when doing anything Quicktime related.

Continuing progress

Work on the First Language Poetry project has been slow this past week. I had to be out of the building for a reading workshop for two days. The sub, as subs will usually be, was of little help.

I was able to introduce the students to the primary goals of the project, and with their help better map in the parameters. I was able to give a very short lesson on semantic domains of words, introduce the vocabulary word connotation, and I think convey some of the complexity of literature in translation. Testing whether or not i taught anything is another matter though, and something I probably should not make time for.

I won't go into all the reasons I won't test it, but it is interesting there is no Mn Language Arts standard nor ELL standard that relates to this kind of complex task. That may mean that I am in left field, but the students were quite interested in it, had many questions and personal observations. It seems quite relevant to advanced ELL students.

Students were able to get some lab time but I have not yet been able to track their progress.

Pizza

Learned some new things in class last night.

Got account on delishous, or however you spell it, which of course could be a problem but google has a spell checker. I think this site might useful for some students to do Internet research. But i suspect that most students will be too busy with the basics to compound the confusion. I had intended to teach dropping web location pointers to a desktop folder to make the easily transportable on a flashdrive but perhaps i should use delecous instead... if they can spell it. Doesnt this thing have a spell checker?

Bob and i have cooresponded some about the project. He found a site on Somali poetry. When i first looked at i only zeroed in on some mediocre poetry, but Bob pointed out the informative description on the recent history and currency of Somali poetry that will be a good starting point for the Somali students.

It became clear last night that i should consider breaking the project up into two major stages: Doing research on what is known and available about the poetry and poets of the language on the Internet and then looking closely at a particular poem in the first language and what can and cannot be communicated about it. These have two very different objectives. The former being the language's place in the gigantic domain of 'world literature' and the later a direct experience of the complexity of looking at literature from other cultures and the deceptiveness of literature in 'translation'.

This is my second posting.

It is not as engaging as my first post. But it is even more concise.

Blog creation

First post. This is to begin a blog. This should be concise and to the point. Mission accomplished.