Gregg+Cefalo

Below is my Final paper. Enjoy

7/22/12 (Tim Conrad): I'm always trying to work on my Spanish. Now you've pointed out I need to work on my Math (language) :) Thank you for your ESL-math insights and your enthusiastic teaching throughout this month of the ESL community class! Also, we share the purple blood of the Box Elder Bees!

7/15/12 (Karla Barrow) Gregg. I thought you made some great points not only in your presentation but also in your paper. The activity that you demonstrated is something that I might use with students as I move from preschool to working with older students as a speech #|therapist. I agree in the importance of vocabulary. It seems to me that it is a huge key in the use and understanding of a language.

7/15/12 (Ben Browning) I totally agree with both of your comments. Your insights are great, Gregg. I felt as if you were trying to say that teachers need to simplify their vocabulary to help out all students, especially ELLs. Since I teach foreign language I can totally see this. I really enjoyed the example of the woman you met from Columbia. That is #|concrete evidence of the point you are making. The presentation was awesome as well. I will definitely use it in my classroom.

7/14/12 (Monica Widdison) I totally agree with the notion that math is its own language. Even when teaching elementary students, if they don't know the words they almost always struggle with the numbers. I really loved the activity that you presented to us in class. I will use it to teach vocabulary. It is a great visual and kinesthetic activity to get all learners involved.

7/19/2012 (Snow Smith) I agreed with you. I also can totally understand why people say Math is a subject that requires its own language. Often we forget that math requires its own language because most of us we learn math in our native language. When we put ourselves in ELL students’ shoes, we will understand easily why math has it’s own language. I like your examples of how math requires its own language on paragraph 2 and 3. I also like how you use a hands-on activity to help students learn math vocabulary. Learning Vocabularies can be boring and dry; it will help students’ learning so much when a teacher introduces some learning techniques to help students remember math vocabularies. It is very important to help students to understand key math vocabularies so students understand and do math questions correctly. Great job.

7/9/2012 I felt like the instruction went well tonight. Both Marisol and Vanessa were engaged with the information since it was something that they both wanted to learn better. I think that they fully didn't understand why we use quarters, dimes and nickles but I tried my best to help them understand the purpose of quarters. It seems like they are understanding better. It was intersting for me since Brandy was not there to translate and I had to learn some more new words in spanish since the words were different in portuguese.

7/7/2012 (Tim Conrad): I like Brandy's encouragement of Marisol and belief in her abilities. I also like your idea about trying out a conversational experience with them, or a somewhat controlled activity that approximates real conversation. Why don't you think about how you might do this. I also have a book I could show you that breaks the conversational experience into doable functions with practices you could try out.

7/2/2012 Well tonight we had Marisol and Vanessa. Vanessa has not been able to come due to sickness but she was here tonight. I have to agree with Brandy that Marisol has more abilities than she allows herself to believe. She does well with the information and I think that she has really good pronunciation. My question is how much is she retaining? When we give papers for her to work on at home she does not bring them back and I don't know how much she is actually doing them. We gave her two worksheets to work on last week and we also gave two worksheets tonight. We figured since it will be a week until we see her again it would be good for her. Vanessa is doing really well. She seems to understand the words a lot more and I don't think there was a time that we had to help her understand what the meaning of the sentence was. I think it would be interesting to see how much of a conversation they could carry with their English. I think that it might be fun to take all of the words we have practiced and role play them into a real life situation. This would help me better understand if she is retaining the information or if we need to review more.

July 1, TC: Good point about review of material. We'll have to mention that to everyone as an idea for good language retention and also an important aspect of lesson preparation as a way to meaningfully fill up time in a long hour and a half class period. I'm glad you're getting some Spanish and Portuguese practice too :)

6/27/2012 Tonight Eulda did not come to class so Brandy and I just had Marisol to teach. This was a great chance for me to practice my Spanish. It was fun to learn some more of the words that are the exact same in Spanish and Portuguese but also realize that there are some words that are completely different. Marisol knows a lot more then she lets on to. It was nice to see how much she retained from the last class. We did a little review of Monday's material instead at the beginning before we went on to new material. She is very eager to learn and she asks great questions to make sure that she is understanding what the entire sentence is saying. It is great to see her enthusiasm.

6/25/2012 This evening I was able to go over some of the names of family members with Eulda. She did okay with some of the basic names but she seemed to struggle with the names of extended family members as well as in-laws. I think that by the end she was doing okay. She really struggled with some of the way you speak certain words. Niece was a word taht she struggled a little with. I noticed that she likes to say "namie" instead of name. It is very normal since that is the way that a lot of Portuguese speakers pronounce the word name. I am excited to see what she has studied for Wednesday's class.

June 26, Tuesday (T Conrad): It seems to me, Gregg that your teaching of Euda this month is really crucial because you're the only one in our class who knows her first language. She has such important reasons for wanting to become conversational in English. I think also it is a good opportunity for you to practice your Portuguese and this experience could be a very special two-way learning situation. From talking to Euda's daughter, I can tell this is a big help to her because she told me she feels bad for her mom because there is so little outlet for her because of her communication dilemma.

6/20/2012

This evening I interview Euda who is from Brazil. This was a great opportunity for me since once was fluent in Portuguese. Euda is visiting her daughter that lives in the US for a month. She would like to learn conversational English so that she can function in society. She would like to be able to go into a store and ask questions about an item or stop someone on the street to get directions or the time. She would also like to be able to communicate with her 3 grandchildren that live in the US that do not speak Portuguese. As I was working with her I noticed that there were words that I need to refresh in my memory to understand and communicate with her. She did try new words by the end of the class. I kind of know how she feels trying to communicate with someone and you know that you are not fully helping them. Euda mentioned that she had a headache by the end of class and so did I from all of the effort that was required to help communicate with her.

This page is for Gregg to post his goodies :D