Picture File Card Strategies!
Did you know you can utilize the Picture File Cards from your unit to do fun activities? This ELD strategy creates opportunities for student interaction, academic discourse, and motivation.
Purpose:
The purpose of the Picture File Card (PFC) activities is to open up discussions about the unit of study, and teach the scientific method of observing, questioning, and predicting. And YES, you can teach the scientific method, even if you are not teaching a science unit!
Process:
For this activity, gather the Picture File Cards from your unit. These pictures can come from the internet, magazines and books, old calendars, and more!
You’ll divide up the pictures so each team has at least 5. You can be purposeful in the photos you select for students- go for photos that are visually interesting, or could spark academic language. From here, there are numerous activities you can do.
Activities:
Strategy | Description |
|---|---|
Free Exploration
| During the “Free Exploration” activity, ask the students to spread out the photos so everyone can see, and allow them to make observations, ask questions, and form predictions about the photos in front of them.
As the instructor, this is our chance to walk around the room and make formative assessments about language production and team working skills. |
Closed Sort
| During a Closed Sort activity, we ask students to sort the PFC based on a category that we choose.
For example, if I am teaching the 3rd grade NGS unit on Life Cycles, I may ask my students to look at the photos and organize them according to the type of organism. Or, I may ask them to sort the organism photos according to the size of the organisms pictured. |
Open Sort
| An Open Sort activity with PFC means that we prompt students to observe the photos, and then sort them. Students will work together to create their own categories of which to sort the photos in.
This is a more cognitively demanding task compared to the Closed Sort, because students are asked to make their own categories, and discuss and debate amongst their team what those categories should be.
There are a number of other activities you can facilitate using PFC, including asking students to create a word bank, list and label, and more. |
Try it out!
These activities can be done at any time during your unit, try even doing the activity multiple times to measure the growth of language and academic discourse occurring in the classroom.
Watch these strategies in action!
Author
Anisa Wasim
Site Achievement DirectorShare this post
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