Presentation for the Minnesota ESL, Bilingual & Migrant Conference, April 15, 2011

Cause & Effect Lesson Materials

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It's Summer! Time for reading success :)

It's time for kindergartners to read all of the 

Pre-Primer Sight Words!

For the students:
Here's a video you can watch to help you learn to read the words, using the pictures and the sentence to understand each word's meaning.  

Can you read the big and yellow words before Ms. Walters does?  

Cause & Effect Writing Samples

Cause and Effect Lesson Extension: I chose to continue my students' practice with cause and effect by having them consider changes that happened in the week's comprehension text and talking with a partner to determine the cause. An additional language goal, besides the use of connecting words to link the cause and effect, was the use of present tense verbs in questions with did. I framed it in a way that's comprehensible for second graders: did is a robber who steals the past tense from verbs. So students discussed with their partner how to ask themselves about the reason for the effects (changes) in the text with a question. Examples of student work: This helped me to informally assess which students already knew (or knew what sounded right) about the tense change with use of did and those for whom it was a new concept. They loved the structure of the paper because it was very clear for them how to organize their ideas! And I appreciated that I could use a highly familiar text for the lesson, so no vocabulary instruction or building background was needed, but there was authentic content. We will continue to use their framework next week, using a different text. My assessment, which I will start the following week, will involve giving students a text at their level and asking them to identify a change independently, write the why question they should ask themselves, identifying the cause, and writing both together in a sentence with the connecting word of their choice. I will need to take away some of my scaffolding next week: students will need to find the changes on their own and remember how to use the connecting words without the organizer.

Making Questions to Ask Ourselves to Find the Cause of a Change

To reinforce the idea that good readers ask themselves why a change happened in a text, we practiced thinking about effects and writing "Why did...?" questions. We took our changes, in the past tense, and wrote them verbatim into questions. Then I asked the students to reflect, constructively, on what sounded wrong about the questions. They thought about the rule that "Did steals the past tense" from the other verb nearby. They all worked together to change the other verb from the past to present tense and rewrote their own question to guide them to the cause in the text. Here are some of our questions, about the book Big Al by Andrew Clements, that we wrote together (and students' independent answers): Why did Big Al (had) have friends at the end of the story? Big Al had a lot of friends because he saved the fishes. Why did Big Al (got) get stuck in the net? Why did the fish (got) get caught? Why didn't Big Al (had) have friends? Big Al didn't have friends because he was big and scary...with sharp teeth. Why did Big Al (saved) save the fish? Big Al saved the fish because he is nice and they could be his friends. Why did Big Al (hid) hide in the sand? Big Al wanted to look smaller so the fish won't be scared so he hid under the sand. Why did Big Al (wore) wear a disguise? Big Al wore a disguise because he wanted to be the fishes friends. Why did the fish and Big Al (became) become friends?