Language Experience Modifications

“Suggested Modifications

Students tend to identify with LEA (local education agency) activities because they reflect their own experiences and are retold in their own words. Consequently, as soon as students are developmentally ready, teachers can use this method to provide explicit guidance in writing within a meaningful and comprehensible context.

Developmental readiness depends on multiple factors such as: age, English language development, literacy levels, prior knowledge about the context, and levels of anxiety. Initially, it would be important for students to just feel comfortable suggesting sentences. However, when teams collaborate on the sentence suggestions, rather than just individuals contributing ideas, explicit guidance can be incorporated much more quickly. Suggestions include:

• Take pictures during an activity, for example a science experiment. Take extra pictures, and have the first task be to sequence the pictures and delete non-essential pictures.
• Determine the most essential information prior to the retelling.
• Encourage students to retell directions in the correct sequence.
• Provide transition words or sentence prompts or frames as needed.
• After teaching basic elements of plot (starting with a visual story that reflect those elements), use the elements to help focus student retelling of a story.

For example, ‘Who was the main character and what was the character doing when the story began?’ ‘What happened that caused a problem?’ ‘What were the consequences of the problem?’ ‘How did the character solve the problem?’ ‘How did the story end?’

• After students have been exposed to the concept of a big idea and supporting details, prompt them in a dictation. For example, students may collaborate in teams to state the main idea of a picture. They can then compare the sentences and collaborate as a class to come up with the best main idea sentence. Teams can suggest details that support the main idea. Students may be asked to eliminate any details that do not support the main idea and classify and order the supporting details prior to incorporating them into the class LEA selection.
• When retelling a learning experience, students are asked to recall what they did in sentence that summarizes the enduring understanding. ‘What is the deep enduring understanding we learned?’ ‘What did we do to help us understand that idea?’ ‘Are all the important details included?’ ‘Is any sentence not needed?’ ‘Can you think of a sentence that makes a good conclusion?’” (Gordon, 2017, pp. 2–3)