Our Plants

I worked as an instructor of English as Second Language (ESL) with adults who had very recently arrived to the United States. This is a copy of a lesson about plants I created to practice the use of pronouns, quantifiers, weather and date vocabulary, and certain verbs (“to have”, “to be”, “to need”, “to like”) and vocabulary about health. Each day as we started class, we could check on our plants, conducting a verbal and written audit of how the plants were doing. Because the structure of the class was set up as continuous enrollment, this structure facilitated a way to welcome new students with a new plant and a ritual that established students could teach and practice, while continuously building on their own proficiency. It also invited a culture of caring and relationships to ourselves and the world around us, and I learned a lot from each student about how they tended to plants in their home countries.