What's Your News?: Portraits of a Rich Language and Literacy Activity for English - Language Learners

by Dr. Patrick Manyak.

The Reading Teacher: 61. Pp.440 – 448

What I have viewed in the past regarding “What’s Your News” was a fifth grade class that wrote about school events in a letter that went home to their parents. For this activity the first step was to determine five topics that they were interested in that occurred during the past school week. After the five topics were selected by vote, the teacher placed the children into five small groups. Each group had a scribe while the rest of the children in the group helped formulate the ideas to write about around the topic they were assigned. They had about ten minutes to write a paragraph on their topic. Finally, the teacher would help the students edit the written paragraphs in a whole group. After the corrections, the teacher copied the information into a newsletter that went home to the parents.

This helped provide a school to home connection. Plus it was a connection for the students at school so that they could reflect upon the past week and the activities that they were involved in. Greater learning occurs when children do this.

I feel that when Patrick Manyak had the classes share news from the home with the school that even a greater connection was made especially for the ESL students. In this case, it helped the students learn more about each other and helped them form a closer community. You could see that the students were highly motivated because they could share something about themselves. It was permitted to share in either Spanish or English so they were comfortable in this activity.

The fifteen minute process did not take long but was very effective. As the children shared their news, at first the teachers were the scribes and pointed out spelling patterns and punctuation. They would ask students to stretch out words and spell them. Then the whole group would read it chorally. This gave the ESL student lots of opportunities to hear, see, spell, and say the words. Since both teachers knew Spanish, the students could respond in either Language although it was written in English.

At the half way mark of the school year, it was wonderful to note that students were able to be scribes and write the news themselves because of their past history in performing this activity.

They learned how to use who, what, where, when, and why in reporting news and also how to add more details.

The ESL students were at low risk of failure in participating in this group activity. They were very comfortable performing it.

Since it has been proven that students are more successful when they can share their lives, this would definitely be an activity to help bring the community life into the classroom of ESL and nonESL students. I would like to try this sometime in the classroom.

Ida M. Rounds