Structured Language Routine III: Whip Around

My apologies
Please forgive the many days since the last entry. As you can well imagine, and am sure, experiencing yourself, there is so much to do at school now that the school year is well under way. Now, multiply that by half a dozen schools and you'll get a sense of what I am faced with every day.

But hey, I'm back. And with yet another Structured Language Practice to share, the "Whip Around."

What is the "Whip Around?"

This is a strategy in which the teacher elicits responses to a prompt in a quick but structured manner. By quick, this means about no more than 10-15 seconds for one response to the teacher's prompt. By structured, it means that there is a predictable established pattern to the order of the responses, so that students know when they will expected to produce language. For example, up and down a row of desks, clockwise around a table, etc.

When is it appropriate to use?

This is a type of structured language practice that does require the teacher to supervise both the process and the resulting product. Generally speaking, this is a good strategy to help students produce all they know about a particular topic, or have learned about a particular topic. As part of the Evaluation/ Reflection portion of an ELD Lesson (which we have not yet discussed) , it lends itself as a quick and efficient way for the teacher to check in on whether or not her English Learners internalized the topical vocabulary introduced in the ELD lesson for the day.

However, it is also possible to use during the Guided Practice portion of the ELD lesson if students are asked to produce a grammatical feature that they know well, or have had practice with. This can be a great way to review/ practice a language response using the topical vocabulary learned (of course with the language prompt written out on sentence strip and pictures to accompany the vocabulary as a reference).

It all depends on the purpose.

There are plenty more to explore, but I'll probably just share a couple more, as there is much more to discuss in the world of English Learners. I mean, we haven't even started discussing the world beyond instruction, like ELACs and DELACs and waivers, etc.

We'll get there soon enough.

- W