Saturday English Camp: Pancakes, Pancakes for second graders!
Last year, we hosted three Saturday English Camps and invited our students who are struggling to make growth in English to attend for free! It's a big challenge for our teachers and students to grow in their English capacity when so many of our kids have little exposure to language at home, come in speaking Spanish only at home or demonstrating a strength in neither English nor Spanish. This is one of the initiatives we've tried to help our kids who are stuck in one level of English acquisition. The main focus of our English camps were listening, speaking, reading, and writing in English. We incorporate fun, hands-on activities, and language acquisition strategies such as chants, songs, poems, GLAD charts, etc. First, our second graders read Pancakes for Breakfast by Tomie DePaola, a wordless picture book classic!
Then they sequenced pictures from the story to retell using sequencing words such as "first," "after that," etc.
The teachers called them up in groups to watch pancake batter start to bubble and cook on a griddle and the kids described that they saw using specific and scientific language.
Once enough pancakes were made, and students had finished writing about the changes they saw in the batter, moving from a liquid to a fluffy solid and releasing gas, they came back up to the table and explained which toppings they wanted on their pancakes.
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