Hazardous Environments EAL SOW
This might be best described as a ‘nano-SOW’. It was one of the first sets of resources I produced for my classes in the Middle East. The focus is on the basic concepts of plate tectonics and the impact they have on land formation and geological features/events on the surface.
Again, the target audience is those with low ability and/or EAL issues. Students that can’t communicate very well in English find it hard to suddenly be assessed on their ability to describe conservative plate boundaries! These lessons are designed to build them up ready for more developed lessons on these topics.
Each lesson comes on a handful of self- contained worksheets. I focus on expanding vocabulary with a glossary featuring a new noun, verb and adjective each lessons. Cloze and match up activities form the bulk of the work with pictures and icons to represent the key vocabulary.
I found them very useful in settling a class. Differentiation by outcome takes place organically which is quite useful in international school settings. Year groups are often too small to group by ability and so each class has a wide range of EAL requirements. By letting students work at them at their own pace there’s an obvious bonus in classroom management and you can work more closely with students that need to extra help to get started. Each lesson comes with a word search activity at the end as an incentive to keep working until the end (these are oddly popular in my experience).
Pedagogically speaking this will win no prizes for innovation. However, in terms of settling a challenging class and giving you the time to work one to one with the students it works very well at improving learning outcomes.
