See-Think-Wonder Model

The See-Think-Wonder strategy is a very strong strategy to build background knowledge. This is because it gives the children the opportunity to come up with their own ideas about what they are going to learn. It allows the children to think for themselves and collaborate with other children to discuss what they are looking at. The photos provide the students with strong visuals of the concepts that they need to learn. 

This activity is focused on oral language and images rather than reading and writing because the students in the class are at the beginning stages of proficiency in their new language. Therefore, this activity wants the children to be able to use their home languages and as much of their new language as they possibly can to create their own background knowledge. This concept is engaging and allows the children to gain the knowledge they need in a thoughtful and insightful way. This also build upon using higher order thinking skills. This activity uses higher order thinking because they need to closely analyze photos and come up with their own concepts. The teacher already has in mind what is going on in these images, but the students job is to come up with their own thoughts. Also, turning this thoughts about what they see to what they think they are portraying is a higher order thinking skill. They need to relate those thoughts to the content they are going to learn. This is the same for coming up with questions. Forming questions can be a difficult concept to grasp. The questions they come up with need to be content related and based back to the images that they viewed. 

This activity does reach students at different proficiency levels. This is due to the fact that the children are given options to how to respond to the images. Some children may discuss the images in their home languages with a student who has the same home language. Other students who are a bit more proficient in English may write down their ideas and annotate the images. Students who have some literacy skills in their L1 can also use that to jot down what they are seeing. Therefore, this activity is created to reach students at all proficiency levels. 

Through the use of the See-Think-Wonder method, the information is becoming comprehensible to the students. I feel this way because the teacher is scaffolding and guiding the students on how to complete the task. She is also allowing the students to use the language that they are most comfortable using. This allows the students to focus on the content and not just the language. Also, by creating the word wall and having the students come up with the translations in their home language is also helping to make the content comprehensible. They are able to understand the content in their own language before they translate it into English. 

Thought Provoking Images 

This image would be an image I use to teach a lesson about destruction an revolutions in other countries and how it effects the people in the countries. This image portrays an important message and allows students to understand how people in other countries are suffering. This would be an eye opening lesson on how good we have it in the United States and how we should treat others with respect. This concept can be relatable to ELLs because sometimes they come from countries because of wars and revolutions that are happening and causing havoc in their towns. This forces them to flee and become refugees. 

This image could also be used with the image above. This image portrays life in other countries. Once again, it would be an eye opening lesson on how the United States is different than other countries. This would promote high order thinking skills because the students would need to draw their own conclusions as to why these 5 boys are riding in the trunk of a car. This would further discussion amongst the students in either their home language or their new language.