Grade 2 - Multilingual Ways to Express Ourselves

Our Grade 2 teachers Ms. Alison and Ms. Fatima are sharing their successful multilingual moments with us. Below, our teachers explain how their lesson turned into a fun and engaging activity when using different languages. 

We appreciate our teachers' flexibility, their effort and dedication to multilingualism at TIS!


"We were introducing how we express ourselves by expressing different feelings through facial expressions, voice, sculpture, etc.  Students had a personal visual with facial expressions to use during the session to support participation. Afterwards, some of the students in pairs (according to home languages), translated all of the expressions into home languages and then presented to the rest of the class.


Then, another student said- "I want to do it in Russian!" Another one said, "Me too, in Uzbek! and then, "Can I do in Hindi?" One student did the activity in class, and two took it home. 

The next morning some students presented the words that they had translated at home and gave us a lesson in Uzbek and Hindi. Ms. Fatima told a story about feeling "worried" whilst using the Uzbek word, and then at the end she felt hursand  "happy" in Uzbek when the problem was resolved.She uses a lot of gestures and expression to help communicate meaning.


Afterwards, we were learning about how we can express feelings in different ways. We all made a sculpture to express a feeling. To help support the language for discussion  we  used sentence frames to discuss their sculptures: 

"I think you are expressing the feeling ____________ through your sculpture.

“ I think that because________"

 "I expressed the feeling ________" 


During writing, emergent English speakers used these visuals to write sentences "I feel happy when___________________." I have attached a few photos below. Now, we plan to match the facial expressions together and use them in our morning meeting.

Students are excited to share their languages and have been sharing books together in a variety of languages that we have been able to check out from the school library.  

Ms. Fatima uses different languages with all students in the class. Words in their home languages she uses to all language learners. I think that this transmits that all languages are beautiful, fascinating and important to share with each other and that we all learn from each other.”






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