ESL Friendship Journal Lesson Plan
Build English Language Skills, Writing Skills, Classroom Community
Sep 17, 2008
Primary grade students – particularly English language learners – need context for building their communication and writing skills. A simple language and writing experience, with built-in flexibility, can help ESL students to improve both spoken and written language skills.
Materials and Time-Frame for Friendship Journal Experience
Construct a class set of “Friendship Journal” books made of handwriting pages with room at the top for picture drawing. Plan for each book to have enough pages to represent each child in the class.
Focus on one child each day. The activity generally takes 45 minutes to an hour.
Lesson Steps for Producing Friendship Journals
Invite the students to sit in a circle in the class meeting area. Choose one child to sit in the middle of the circle.
Ask the children to be “detectives” and to tell what they notice about the featured child. They can describe a physical characteristic (e.g. “Jose has brown hair” or “He has blue shoes”) or say something affirmative, such as “Tyra is a good friend.” The experience is most meaningful when every child contributes.
Remind the children to listen carefully to each other; the challenge is to say something unique and not repeat what others have just said. However, the teacher should repeat each descriptive statement back to the class, being sure to correctly model any incorrect grammar.
After everyone has had a turn to offer a descriptive statement about the featured child, the teacher should recap all the statements, then ask the featured child to choose one of the statements for the class to write. Write the sentence on the board or on chart paper, actively modeling whichever conventions need to be reviewed (e.g. capital letters, spaces between words, punctuation choices).
The children then copy the sentence into their Friendship books. Children who wish to add more sentences should be encouraged to do so. Students should also illustrate the sentence.
Evaluation of Students' Language Progress
Children’s written work can be evaluated on an as-needed basis, and corrections made when errors in writing are produced. However, the focus of the experience is language development. The evaluation is most meaningful if conducted informally and regularly. The teacher can watch for evidence of progress such as a growing diversity of contributions from individual children, correct grammar usage over time, and the ability and willingness to go beyond the modeled sentence to add meaningful text.
Enrichment Follow-Up For the Friendship Journal Project
Type each sentence for children who need extra practice reading or for those who exhibit hard-to-read handwriting. The students can cut each sentence into individual words, scramble the words, then reconstruct and glue the sentence onto the appropriate page.
Provide mini-photos of the children to cut and glue onto the appropriate pages. Create a typed or teacher-printed copy of the Friendship Journal for the class library. The children can each illustrate their own page for the permanent class copy.
The Friendship Journal experience is a natural and contextual way for ESL students to build upon their emerging English language skills. The teacher can support those who have difficulty expressing themselves in English and model proper grammar. The written experience reinforces sentence writing skills. The assignment can be flexible, allowing children to use their creativity in the illustrations or challenge themselves by writing more. And best of all, the students learn to know each other better and will grow in their sense of the classroom as a community.
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