Hokowhitu ESOL 2009

Hello and welcome to the Hokowhitu ESOL page.

We have been working on digital story telling. Here is the link to our first YouTube hit about where we come from.

At the beginning of the year Mrs Motohashi came to our school to teach Japanese. Here is a video she made with students who already spoke Japanese. This is an example of an apron theatre. Mrs Motohashi made the theatre and the dolls for her JSOL group.

It took us a while due to technical difficulties, but here is our second set of stories. These ones are about our friends at Hokowhitu School. We drew pictures of our friends to accompany our stories.

July 1, 2009

We thought about why we think we came to New Zealand. Some of us even went home and asked our parents, just to make sure. Here are some of our ideas about why we came to New Zealand.

July 3, 2009

As an end to the school’s book week we had a dress-up day. We came to school as characters out of books. During ESOL class the students were handed the microphone and given the opportunity to give an impromptu talk about their costumes. Not everyone chose to speak but here are the children who did.

July 20, 2009

Here is Leila’s story about Zip. She was practicing her use of tenses.

July 21, 2009

Here is Maria’s story. She extended on the ideas in a book we read.

July 25, 2009

We learnt about different types of sentences. As an activity we worked in pairs to create interactions using statements, questions, exclamations and commands. We showed our growing knowledge of word play and humour. We wrote and recorded our pieces in thirty-five minutes.

August 14, 2009

Ms Finikin found a funny picture on ihasahotdog.com. She printed it out and showed us the top part of the picture. We talked about what we saw and predicted what might be hidden. We were quite surprised when we were shown the whole picture.

August 18, 2009

We read Grandma McGarvey Goes to Sea by Jenny Hessell and illustrated by Trevor Pye. We rewrote the story, drew illustrations and recorded our work. Here are our stories.

August 20, 2009

The Kiwi Team ESOL children have been looking at dinosaurs. We looked at these pictures from BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs. This is the group’s first response to what they saw.

August 27, 2009

Ramadan started this week and Anis, Alyah and Dayah are fasting. They explained about why they fast and how they cope. We thought about festivals from our cultures and wrote about them.

September 25, 2009

Over the last four weeks we have been busy with a unit on cats. We planned the unit with Ms Finikin’s help. Alya brought information about bob cats, Maria wrote a quiz and Leila, Grace, Wency, Anis and Alya taught us how to make different types of cat crafts. We enjoyed reading cat books, especially ones by Joy Cowley and Judith Kerr and we had fun singing along to songs from the Word Detective kit. Below are examples of our work. I wonder what we will do next term.

December 4, 2009

The upper ESOL group has been continuing their work on cats. Our latest effort was a set of dioramas. Videos will follow soon.

In the mean time I would like to thank Mrs Mylvaganum for her support this year. She comes in several times a week to work with her buddy and has helped him gain so much confidence in English.

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December 9, 2009

Here is our clip on the dioramas we made. Some of the group mates taught us how to make them and the group had a lot of fun cooperatively writing and producing the work.

We have been talking about different festivals from different parts of the world. Here is some of the information we learned about Saint Nicholas and how the stories about him have evolved. For all that we have learned, some of us are still wondering how the reindeer fly!

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