vegetables we like - learner foreign languages k–12: a library of classroom practices 1 vegetables...

Teaching Foreign Languages K–12: A Library of Classroom Practices 1

Vegetables We Like Video Summary In this lesson, Miss Lahoud’s second-grade Art and Arabic students develop vocabulary through art, drawing pictures of vegetables they like and don’t like, and presenting these to their classmates. Class begins with a “hello” song and a brief review of the weather and days of the week. After introducing the lesson goals, Miss Lahoud shows students pictures of vegetables and leads the class in naming them aloud. Next, she explains the day’s activity, in which students will draw and color the vegetables they like in one bowl and the vegetables they don’t like in another. After students finish their work, they discuss what they drew in their bowls in pairs, and then present their drawings to the rest of the class. Standards Addressed

• Communication: Interpersonal Communication

• Communication: Presentational Communication

• Connections: Making Connections

Read about these standards at the end of this lesson.

Classroom at a Glance Teacher: Rita Lahoud

Language: Arabic

Grade: 2

School: Public School 261 Philip Livingston, Brooklyn, New York

Lesson Date: May 23

Class Size: 17

Schedule: 50 minutes once a week


Key Terms • Foreign Language in the Elementary School (FLES)

• thematic units

Definitions for these terms can be found in the Glossary located in the Appendix.


Class Context “I expect them to learn the culture. I expect them to appreciate the language and the culture foremost. That's the most important part to me. Then I want them to be able to communicate even in a simple way their wants and their needs, just to understand the basic Arabic language.”—Rita Lahoud School Profile Miss Lahoud teaches Arabic to students in grades 1–4 at Public School 261 in Brooklyn, New York. As P.S. 261 is a magnet school for integrating the arts, art is infused throughout the curriculum. Most of the school’s 893 students live in Boerum Hill, a small, affluent neighborhood in northwest Brooklyn. The student body is highly diverse: 40 percent white, 27 percent black, 23 percent Hispanic, 6 percent Asian, and 4 percent other. Arabic is the only foreign language offered at the school. The course was begun four years ago as a foreign language class that met once a week and has evolved into its current format, in which students learn art and science content using Arabic as the instructional language. P.S. 261 is a Global Language Project (GLP) partner school that uses best practices for Foreign Language in the Elementary School (FLES) teaching and learning.

Year at a Glance Syrian Refugee Pinwheel Project

(in coordination with International Rescue Committee)

Olive Harvest Islamic Art (an observation of

important works for art) Weaving and Carpet Making in the

Arab World Fruit and Vegetable Harvest Ramadan and Lanterns


Class Context, cont’d. Lesson Design Miss Lahoud teaches Art and Arabic once a week to classes of Novice speakers. “All my cultural art lessons begin with me teaching a specific art or craft technique, and I explain its importance to Arab culture,” she says. She draws vocabulary words from the materials used in the artwork. She then teaches the steps required to create it. “These are repeated by students and learned throughout the lessons until they've created the art,” she says. “This typically takes three to four lessons.” Because class meets infrequently, she tries to maximize use of the target language in the classroom. For example, she has set up a classroom “store” at which two students play the role of shopkeepers and ask the other students what supplies they need for class activities. Because her course is so unique, she has had to develop her own curriculum over the years. “I refer to ACTFL performance [descriptors] for the language goals and New York State Learning Standards for the Arts for some of my art goal planning,” she says. “I also bring a lot of my own ideas as to what I think would be beneficial for students to learn at any given time.” This year, the school partnered with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has borrowed from the museum’s curriculum for its Art of the Arab Lands galleries. Teaching students about Arabic art provides an obvious exposure to Arab culture. Class projects that allow students to create traditional handcrafts include carpet weaving, calligraphy, and hand-painting tiles. Through these projects, students learn the names of colors, shapes, and more. Art and Arabic course content also naturally connects with several subject areas beyond art, including math, science, and history. For example, students have a chance to see artifacts from the Metropolitan Museum’s collection and learn where they came from, when they were created, and the stories behind them. Miss Lahoud reminds students to stay in the target language as they work. She also relies on classmates to remind one another. While she uses body language, visuals, and intonation to convey ideas and instructions as she teaches, she also employs native speakers she might have in a class as peer tutors to support classmates who may need further guidance. To help students process and retain information, Miss Lahoud uses board games,


Class Context, cont’d. movement exercises, and music. “Music is a huge part of my program,” she says. “I create a song for each unit and a song for everything that I want them to learn, and it really helps.” The Lesson This class of second-grade Novice students has been studying Arabic since kindergarten, and includes one native speaker. Class begins in a typical fashion on the carpet at the front of the room with meeting time—during which students sing a “hello” song and then talk about the weather and days of the week—and a review of the lesson goals. Miss Lahoud then explains that they will be learning about vegetables and drawing pictures of which ones they like and don't like. In the previous week’s class, students compared how vegetables are purchased and sold in the United States (in modern supermarkets) with how they are purchased in different Arab countries (in souks, or open-air markets). “Today my lesson was really to get them to say, ‘I like tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce, and I don't like garlic and onions,’” she says. “In order to do that, I had them draw two different bowls. One would contain all the vegetables that they like, and the other one would contain all the vegetables that they don't like.” Before students started their drawings, Miss Lahoud had them obtain art supplies from the classroom “store.” The classmates made their requests and then took their supplies to begin their project. When students finished their drawings, Miss Lahoud invited them back to the carpet and asked them to “turn and talk” with a classmate about their likes and dislikes. “Turn and talk” activities provide students with an opportunity for interpersonal communication before they present to their classmates. To prepare students for the activity, she first modeled the conversation with a student. This allowed her to stay in the target language while clarifying her expectations to the students. After students finished talking with their partners, Miss Lahoud asked them to present their artwork and say sentences to the class.


Class Context, cont’d. Key Teaching Strategies ● Appealing to Multiple Intelligences: The teacher incorporates different

nonverbal approaches, such as bodily/kinesthetic and musical/rhythmic ones, into lessons.

● Content-Based Instruction: The teacher promotes language acquisition and/or cultural knowledge through subject matter from a range of disciplines.

● Establishing Routines: The teacher establishes clear, expected routines

to maximize productive class time, increase student responsibility, and minimize distractions or opportunities for misbehavior. Examples range from consistent procedures to begin the class (from discussing the day, date, and weather for today, yesterday, and tomorrow to having students pair up to craft one comment about a prompt or a visual) to cooperative learning activities for language practice to routines for providing peer feedback.

● Visualizing Vocabulary: The teacher uses visuals to establish concrete

images of vocabulary and to help students remember the terms.


Analyze the Video As you reflect on these questions, write down your responses or discuss them as a group. Before You Watch Respond to the following questions: ● How might you connect with content of other disciplines? What content

areas might enhance the learning of your students?

● What kinds of activities engage young children in the language classroom?

● What are some strategies you can use to introduce new sets of

vocabulary to students with minimal target language skills? Watch the Video As you watch "Vegetables We Like," take notes on Miss Lahoud’s instructional strategies, particularly how she manages a classroom of young learners, keeps students in the target language, and connects art-based lesson content with language goals. Write down what you find interesting, surprising, or especially important about the teaching and learning in this lesson. Reflect on the Video Review your notes, and then respond to the following questions: ● What was the purpose of the opening routine? Why might establishing

consistent routines be helpful when teaching younger students?

● What was the benefit of the classroom store? What kind of language did it allow the students to practice?

● How did Miss Lahoud make her speech comprehensible to her

students? What techniques did she use?


Analyze the Video, cont’d. Take a Second Look Watch the video again, but this time, focus on the following teaching practices: content-based instruction and classroom management.

Practice: Content-Based Instruction

Through art projects, students in Miss Lahoud’s Art and Arabic class build vocabulary and cultural knowledge. ● How might learning content from other subjects increase learner

engagement?

● What evidence do you see of students learning art content? What evidence do you see of students learning Arabic?

● How might drawing help students process the new vocabulary words?


Analyze the Video, cont’d.

Practice: Classroom Management

Miss Lahoud’s strong classroom management skills foster engagement and keep students in the target language. ● What routines has Miss Lahoud established to create smooth

transitions between activities? How did the classroom store enhance those transitions?

● What role did the students take in establishing an Arabic-only environment? How did the students interact with each other when they heard English?


Connect to Your Teaching Reflect on Your Practice As you reflect on these questions, write down your responses or discuss them as a group. ● How do you engage your students with products (art, visuals, realia)

from other cultures? How do these elements support use of the target language and build learners’ language performance?

● Do you have stations in your classroom? What are some possible activities that are well suited to autonomous learning in small groups of learners? What should be in place in order to make such stations successful—and not a challenge to classroom management?

● How might you alter the activities shown in the video to suit older

learners? Watch Other Videos Watch other videos in the Teaching Foreign Languages K–12 library for more examples of teaching methodologies like those you've just seen. Note: All videos in this series are subtitled in English. ● Fruits of the Americas (Spanish) illustrates how students learn the

names of different fruits and then practice the vocabulary words with partners and with the class.

● Mapping Planet Earth (French) features activities that enable students to connect content from different other subject areas.

● Interpreting Picasso's Guernica (Spanish) provides an example of

connecting language with art for more advanced learners.


Connect to Your Teaching, cont’d. Put It Into Practice Try these ideas in your classroom. Where it’s not already evident, reflect on how to adapt an idea that targets one performance range for application to other performance ranges. ● When planning your lessons, think about ways to involve different

sensory experiences in your activities. Sight and sound are easy to incorporate into a world-language curriculum; there may be fewer opportunities to employ touch, taste, and smell. When they are included, these other senses can be crucial in helping students retain vocabulary because the students connect the new words to their lived experiences. If your school’s policy allows it, bring in realia whenever possible. If you’re teaching a unit on cooking, bring in the actual foods to share and eat with your students. If you’re doing a unit on shopping, bring in real coins from your target culture for them to feel or use in a role-playing activity.

● Incorporate art into your curriculum at all levels.

○ Have students identify what they see in a landscape painting or

photograph, for example. Ask what they would smell and how they would feel. Have students identify all they can to place the scene in a context (e.g., the season, historical time period, geographical location, and more).

○ When teaching languages that have a script unfamiliar to your students, lessons on calligraphy can be a great way to connect art to learning a new alphabet.

○ Cartoons can also be an excellent means to spark conversation.

Give uncaptioned cartoons to your students and have them imagine what the characters are saying. Additionally, students of all levels can draw and caption their own cartoons using language accessible to their level.


Connect to Your Teaching, cont’d.

○ For students with stronger language skills, expose them to important pieces of art from your target culture and have them interpret the pieces.


Resources Lesson Materials Opening Lesson Routine* A description of the 10–15-minute routine that Miss Lahoud uses to begin each class Song Lyrics* Lyrics to the three songs that Miss Lahoud uses in her opening routine Vegetable Bowl student worksheet* A worksheet used to accompany the art activity in which students draw vegetables they like and don’t like in side-by-side bowls * These lesson materials can be found in the Appendix. Curriculum References For language goals: ACTFL Performance Descriptors for Language Learners https://www.actfl.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/ACTFLPerformance-Descriptors.pdf For art planning: New York State Learning Standards for the Arts http://www.p12.nysed.gov/ciai/arts/pub/artlearn.pdf Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Art of the Islamic World: A Resource for Educators http://www.metmuseum.org/learn/educators/curriculum-resources/art-of-the-islamic-world Rita Lahoud’s Additional Resources Print Resources:

Erfani, Mohammad Imran. Arabic for Beginners. Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India: Goodword Books, 2013.


Standards World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages The World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages create a roadmap to guide learners to develop competence to communicate effectively and interact with cultural understanding. This lesson correlates to the following Standards: Communication: Communicate effectively in more than one language in order to function in a variety of situations and for multiple purposes Standard: Interpersonal Communication Learners interact and negotiate meaning in spoken, signed, or written conversations to share information, reactions, feelings, and opinions. Standard: Presentational Communication Learners present information, concepts, and ideas to inform, explain, persuade, and narrate on a variety of topics using appropriate media and adapting to various audiences of listeners, readers, or viewers. Connections: Connect with other disciplines and acquire information and diverse perspectives in order to use the language to function in academic and career-related situations Standard: Making Connections Learners build, reinforce, and expand their knowledge of other disciplines while using the language to develop critical thinking and to solve problems creatively.

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