Week #6 - Blog #9

We began a unit on South America and the issues regarding the Brazilian Rainforest.  To introduce the unit I used two texts, The Great Kapok Tree  by Lynne Cherry and Planet Earth:  Amazing Animals of the Rainforest by Tracey West.  Both are excellent resources for gathering information about the rainforest.  Definitely, because they are both in a picture book format, they are very visual for my ELL students.


Students worked in groups of four.  Using a copy of each of the texts the groups created a Tree Map for each text, utilizing the map to gather information about the five layers of the rainforest:  water, forest floor, understory, canopy, and emergent.  Each branch of the tree map was used to capture their thinking about the plants, animals, insects, etc. that are found in each layers.  An example of a blank Tree Map is shown below:

 

As I walked around the room I listened in on conversations in the groups about the books they were using to help them create the Tree Map.  Amazingly, the things I was worried about in regards to the West text were actually positives for the ELL students in the groups.  The text is divided up into smaller text boxes with short concise sentences.  Each box has a visual connected to it.  Some of the vocabulary is a little difficult but the book has a glossary in the back that is written in fairly elementary terms.

In the Cherry fiction story the text is fairly intensive for a picture book.  With support from their peers, the ELL students were able to glean information from this text as well but not to the extent that they were able to do so with the West nonfiction text.  Because it is a fiction text with facts it was a little more difficult to find the information they wanted.

I had also provided copies of pictures from both books that the students were allowed to cut up and paste on their Tree Maps.  This particular Thinking Map is an excellent graphic organizer to use with ELL students because it uses words and pictures and is very linear in its classification.  These Tree Maps provided a means to create a mental image of the layers of the rainforest that certainly helps all students elaborate on their new knowledge. (Hill & Flynn, 2006)  Words and pictures can help all levels of ELL students in acquiring information about the rainforest.  Even more importantly, this type of graphic organizer will also encourage all levels of ELL students to get involved in the collaborative activity.