«MCMC Conference» Meeting the Challenge of the Multicultural Classroom An EU collaborative project between Southwark (UK) and the Algarve (PT) Goldsmiths, University of London, New Academic Building, Room LG02 26 April Context and Decisions Objectives, Resources and planned activities We currently teach in Dog Kennel Hill Primary School where about 45% of the children in reception to Year 6 speak English as an additional language.These children are acquainted with a range of 44 other languages beside English.We chose to work with the Year 2 children because they reflect the rich,diverse cultural and linguistic population of our school. The 4th and 5th session of the CPD module at Goldsmiths College helped us to :.critically analyse the ptactice of teachers as intercultural agents in the classroom and in the school as a whole.apply the principle of inclusion by planning creative approaches to learning for all the children that we support and.to make sure that we include active and kinaesthetic approaches to learning. Methodology The task was to enable EAL pupils access a new story with unfamilair settings, events and language. This was done by: analysing the language demands required in order to understand the text, teachers working together to plan support activities, visits to a local area to expand children’s knowledge of an unfamilair setting in the story,.making props to stimulate involvement in the story and thus aiding memory of events and key characters,.creating visual resources to facilitate memory and order of events,.encouraging children to role play key parts of the story using appropriate language, hot seating of characters modelled by adults, ‘role on the wall’ activities to describe character’s appearance and feelings including reasons for actions in the story and making up a song with a familair tune to help retell the story. República Checa Turquia Outcomes and Impact on learning School: Dog Kennel Hill School Teachers:Marion Cranmer, Jackie Davey, Wayne Cooper, Fatima Duerden and Adeola Soyinka Year groups taught: Years 2, MFL and Ethnic Minority Achievement Support The writing task showed a child remembering the sequence of events in the story. Over two weeks later, the same child used specific vocabulary ‘allotment’ to describe an area she had seen during family outing. This showed tht the child had learnt and understood the concept of allotment and have added this to their bank of vocabularly..Watching peers role play enabled EAL children to suggest reasons for character actions and the impact on the story. This contributed to the ‘role in the wall’ activity. The children were able to distinguish the features, appearance and facial expressions of character as well as behavioural qualities,attitudes or emotions..Role play of specific scenes gave a child confidence to retell parts of the story and improvise what characters might have said in the events..A child could write that the character (Queen) showed different emotions in different parts of the story. Dressing up for role play helped EAL child to recall a lot of detail about the clothing /accessories of main character for example ‘pea ring stuck on her finger’, ‘pea scarf on her her hair’ and ‘the curly, whirly spirals’ of character’s hair. Reflection and future developments Our attendance and participation during the recent CPD module has primarily encourage us to think about the way teacher serve as intercultural agent in classes on multi ethnic and multilingual settings. We have been helped to be aware of the complexities,cultural barriers and other challenges facing children from other cultures when learning alongside their monoligual English speaking peers. This module has empowered us to see areas to include active and collaborative learning in our teaching. All through the six sessions there have been ample opprtunities to share good practices in supporting children’s learning. Moreover the entire MCMC two year project has expanded our scope of teaching with the help of job shadowing experiences with the Algarve counterparts, opportunities to share ideas, expertice and practices with teachers work in similar settings as we do here in Southwark.