Tuesday May 28th, 2013

I was excited about Tuesday knowing how Monday went.  I was excited to see my students and they were also excited to see me!  Tuesday I was responsible for introducing the phoneme /d3/ which is the "j" sound.  However, like most of you know, this can be a tricky sound because "j" is not the only letter that makes this sound.  

To introduce the sound to my students, I put the tongue twister "John’s jeans are orange.  His giraffe’s jacket is green." on the board.  The students and I repeated the tongue twister as fast as we could, over and over again.  After identifying and underlining the words that have the /d3/ sound in it we played a game!  I divided the students into three groups and gave them index cards with words on them.  Some of the words had the /d3/ sound and some of them did not.  As a group they had to decide whether the word belonged in the /d3/ pile or the not /d3/ pile.  Once they finished sorting their cards, the students and I talked about why each word belonged in each pile.  The students really enjoyed it and sorted the words correctly for the most part.  

After the game, I gave students small, blank books.  Students were instructed to pick words with the /d3/ sound from a list on the board and put them into their book.  They were also asked to draw a picture to match the word.  This is a very effective strategy for ESL students because it provides the student with a visual that matches the word.  

Here are examples of student work.

My students LOVE to use bubble letters and it takes them forever to complete the assignment because of this.  

Students were very excited to be authors!  

Today was better than Monday.  They are getting the hang of raising their hand when they want to talk and not shouting out, but we still need to work on that a bit more.  Good thing we still have a whole week ahead!