ELL Case Study - Observations

The Writing Activity

I worked with my teacher (Devorah B) to come up with a writing activity for Yakov. We decided to create a book “Yakov Yakov What Do You See” based off of “Brown Bear Brown Bear” by Bill Martin. We were going to build up to this activity, first Yakov needed to get the basics of reading and writing English. We planned for the activity to take place in the middle of November (A little less than 9 weeks from when we started)

Observation 1

I sat with Yakov as he worked in a small pull-out group with the ESL teacher. There were six students in the group. The teacher was working on the CVC pattern to write new words, review old, and combine both the form sentences. Yakov had been taught short vowel sounds but had difficulty enunciating some of them especially the “E” and “I”. He had been taught the consonant sounds but had trouble differentiating between the B and D. He attempted to read words that the teacher had on a chart, such as pin, pen, and pan. He really worked on it, finally said them, wrote them, and drew a picture for each. The teacher had a color chart with each color word written in that color. Yakov was able to say each color. I was not sure which clues used to say the color, but I believe it was the visual clue of the color itself.

The teacher had sentence strips, each child worked with a partner to read the strips quickly. Such as “Yakov had red pens. Felix has blue pins” were read. Each child then took two sentence strips from the pile, Read it, wrote it in his notebook, and illustrated it. Yakov completed this task happily. The teacher then gave out more complicated sentence strips. Some examples “The six green pens are on the yellow Pan”. Once again small group work was done. The teacher went to each group questioning the children. I observed that Yakov was able to write English with minimal level of proficiency since he was using restricted vocabulary and difficulty pronouncing the vowel sounds. At this point I completed the first SOLOM proficiency assessment and the first writing rubric.  Yakov was at the beginning level on most of the language skills. His listening skills were a little beginning; he was able to comprehend individual words and some common simple short sentences that the teacher said. He can understand simple commands and relied heavily on visual clues. He did understand what he had learned before, but when the teacher began a few minutes on a new topic, he had trouble. The ELL teacher began a new book an introduction to the book “To the Rescue” by Cecile Schoberle; she was beginning a unit on rescue and safety. She introduce the word rescue, demonstrated how she saved a stack of books from falling. She showed how she rescued or saved a boy from tripping over a garbage can.

Observation 2

I sat alone with Yakov we did a walk-through and picture walkthrough of the book “Brown Bear Brown Bear” by Bill Martin. After much repetition he was finally able to say brown bear brown bear what do you see? and I see a... It took a while for him to really understand the picture of the bird, when I told him “ptitsa” (bird in Russian, thank you Google Translate) he smiled, repeated ptitsa and said bird. For the word duck I said quack quack he was not sure about a duck but he said the word “duck”. I then used my laptop to show him the new vocabulary. Repetitive structure made it a perfect book for Yakov. I also showed him a short video of the book on YouTube which was a song by Greg & Steve (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTva3KkhxUA)  with the words on the screen.  He pointed to the words as they were sung. I also reinforced the colors that he had learned in ESL. He also listened to the book read on YouTube as he followed from my copy. He was all smiles as he felt success singing along and then reading along.

Observation 3

I continued with the theme from the previous week. Yakov reread the book “Brown Bear Brown Bear…” He used picture clues to say the words that the animal saw and tried to say the colors. I then gave him index cards with just colors in words only written. Another set of cards had the names of the animals. Using the book, he matched the color with the animal. He then illustrated one after he wrote the words. He enjoyed meeting success in the activity

Observation 4

When I worked with Yakov I asked him to review the book “Brown Bear Brown Bear” he was able to recall most of the colors but not all of the animals. The word children he couldn't get and said boys, having used visual clues. The same with mother he said mommy. However there was quite an improvement over our first visit with the book.

Observation 5 and the writing activity

I worked with Yakov to create his own book called “Yakov Yakov what do you see”. Before we wrote anything we worked very hard for him to verbalize something that he saw. Finally he said “I see a cat looking at me”. We then said “cat cat what do you see: and Yakov said “I see a dog looking at me” the repetitive language was great. He then tried so hard to write using the book as a model and wrote the first three parts of his book. He illustrated it; he took his book to all his peers and teachers to proudly read it to them.

Observation 6

I re-administered the SOLOM he had improved so much he had much more confidence and was very willing to try new things.