A couple of months ago I came across a gem of an online downloadable resource book called ‘100 Activities for Fast Finishers’ by Rachael Harris . “A hundred different activities which students can undertake autonomously within the language classroom”.
Most of the activities on my blog are tweaked versions of well-known existing ESL activities. By ‘multilingualising’ them (I am pretty sure that is not a word) they often become international- minded translanguaging activities that can be used to encourage and promote bi/multilingualism in schools. Below are three great examples.
Tweaked they look like this:
Imagine what a great account of multilingual knowledge that can be shared with the school community!
This is a great EAL activity for the last period of the day, summarising their day’s learning. Some of our students’ parents don’t speak English well and this would be a perfect way for our learners to translanguage and involve their parents.
Summarising skills, identifying key information are essential skills for EAL learners. Transferring key concepts and key information to their home language ensures the essential learning of CALP in both languages.
Rachael Harris ‘s book contains many more fun and useful activities like these and I hope you start ‘multilingualising’ too. Please, send me your suggestions or perhaps activities you already successfully do with your learners and I will post them in the ‘Ideas Worth Sharing‘ section of this webiste.