How does your garden grow? Children's language learning records

Looking for a way to record language learning progress?

Well what about how does your garden grow?

(Even if you don't create these physical records with your class,I think for me it's a good image of what we hope to achieve with the children. Strong healthy language learners who have a bright,colourful, diverse and successful language learning career with us in primary school)

I know that quite a few of my colleagues like to keep aphysical paper copy of the learning experience of their children in their ownindividual classes. I know that children too like a record of what they havelearned, where they are going to do next and what success they are achieving throughoutthe school year. This simple graphic record will be something that the languageassociate assistants/teachers and myself will trial with some of our Year 3children this coming academic year. Maybe this idea is something that you maylike to use too…..?

Basically it’s a garden scene- flowers, a tree, sunshine withlots of rays and a flowerbed of weeds! Each child will have an A4 landscape pieceof card, kept in their trays/ drawers etc. When they receive the card therewill be a tree trunk (divided into sections), a flower stem (broad and long enoughfor children to write along the length of it) and an empty area on the right-handside which is the flowerbed for our weeds.

Our flowers? 

Well every child will have asunflower- the centre will be their faces (a drawing, cartoon or photo) and thestems will contain their own simple target language writing of a greeting andtheir name phrase. The petals will contain our exploration of content as weprogress through the year e.g foods, days, months, numbers etc. Each petal willbe added as a glued on petal as we progress and the children can add examplesof the language from the specific focus in their own preferred style.

The tree..

....iswhere we will show the links we make .The stem will be big and strong and will befilled in over the four years we use the record. Here we will record the languagestructures we encounter, practise and grow more confident with e.g questions, answersnouns, adjectives, verbs: commands/present tense/near future/personal pronouns……thestems of my trees will be coloured in – colour coded and containing a titlesuch as “nouns” to represent the different language structures we will meet. Thechildren will add examples in written target language to remind them of whatthey have used, practised, mastered. The branches and twigs will be all theconversations and spoken language practise we have over the course of the fouryears – e.g. getting to know you talk, café talk,likes and dislikes etc, etc.

The sunshine?

This is where we will share all the wonderful opportunities we will have had to explorestories, songs, poems, games  ,drama,culture, links with schools abroad etc  andeach ray will be another wonderful opportunity  that the children want to remember and record-written in English as a descriptive sentence .The middle of the  sun will be made up by a cut out circle of theglobe – just reminding them how learning a language offers you so many world-wideopportunities and adventures!

Finally what about those weeds? 

Well the weeds are temporary and will all be keptin a list in a flowerbed to the right of the main pictures. Children can record at the end of a languagefocus something that they are not sure about or want to know more about and aswe resolve these problems or find out more, then they can bit by bit colour thewritten statement in until it becomes a colourful stripy flowerbed of resolvedquestions about language learning.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1h6rht1K9I]