This post is part of a series of reflections on my ELL students’ participation in Out Of Eden Learn’s online global project, Stories of Human Migration.
The schools in our walking party are from Indonesia, Los Angeles, Kansas, Massachusetts and New York.
Our learning journey began with us reading about Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk finding out about our walking parties and imagining what their lives might be like.
Personal connections
As we read stories from other students, we become more curious and this led to a deeper engagement with the learning materials and with other students. By looking at students’ activity feeds their engagement and curiosity can be viewed in their communication with students from other schools.
Here is one example of an interaction between my student and a student in Kansas.
Our Own Stories of Migration
My family and I live in Kansas. Kansas isn’t the most interesting state from my family and I opinions, so that is why we travel. The reason we live in Kansas is because of family. Our cousins, grandparents, aunts all very close together which I love. My parents wanted my sister and I to experience more things. So every summer since I was just a baby we went somewhere in the US. My parent’s goal was to get us to all 50 states before I graduate high school. I am a freshman now and I only have 2 more states to go to. Some years we do repeats of some states to visit friends and family there. The two states I have not been to are California and Hawaii. We are going to California this summer! I have so many great memories from every state. After we go to every state we are planning on going overseas. My goal for when I get older is to travel the whole world.
Yeah, there was definitely something special about each state. The main state I saw a different culture in was Alaska. In Alaska, there were many tribes that I saw and it was very interesting to look at how they live and how they get food. They had the same privileges as us but use them differently.
Class discussions on posts
We start our ELL lesson by opening up the Out of Eden Learn Social platform and reading posts and responding to comments. When we read our first post from New York my students did not know what the student was saying. So as a class we all read the post and our curiosity led us to ask questions about the school and the socioeconomic situation of the Bronx. By noticing and asking questions we learnt about others’ lives and interacted by writing a class comment using the dialogue toolkit.
Engaging with resources: Listening & Reading
- Listen to Paul’s audio on Borders, recorded from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan in December 2016. You can read a transcript of the audio here.
In our ELL class, this reading by Paul and the transcript provided an opportunity to explore intonation and pace and how these aspects of language are connected to meaning. We also used the Thinking Routine, Sentence, Phrase, Word to notice what stood out for them and for students to justify their responses by discussing themes, ideas and to unpack the text messages. On a word and sentence level, there were metaphors and a variety of sentence lengths to discuss.
Thinking Routine
To make this post interactive my students have posted their responses in the comments below.
It was so cool and lucky for you, so that means you have been to different states which are more than 45 states. By the way, have you learnt any special things in those states? Their culture, people or anythings else?