Room Transformations for ELLs

    If you are looking for a way to spice up your instruction, I encourage you to try a room transformation for your students. A room transformation is a way to change up the learning environment with a theme to support the delivery of your instructional content in a unique way. Now, I know what you maybe be thinking... the amount of work and time this will take! Please keep in mind that a room transformation doesn’t need to be anything over the top. Doing something small for your students such as dressing up or implementing food or music into a lesson can create just as much magic! To be honest, the past few years in the classroom has been extremely draining to me and I kept feeling like something was missing. I just started incorporating room transformations last school year and for me, planning these lessons has given me more energy and passion. I get super excited when putting together these lessons because for me I am creating an experience for my students with meaningful world world connections and it truly has kept the fire going for me.

    Now I know on social media room transformations have been very popular and such a big hit with many teachers. I first learned about them through Hope King. (If you don’t know who Hope King is, please google her now!) I knew that I immediately wanted to try out this instructional strategy but I wanted to make sure that I kept my ELL students in mind and immediately I thought of the affective filter. If you haven’t heard of the AF hypothesis (Stephen Krashen) it is basically a psychological filter that can either facilitate or hinder language production in the second language. When the affective filter is high, students may experience stress, anxiety and lack of self-confidence that may inhibit success in acquiring a second language. A low affective filter facilitates risk taking behavior in regards to practicing and learning a second language. I kept thinking, what if I could use room transformations as an instructional strategy to help lower students affective filters? I immediately came up with a plan to create lessons for DIFFICULT CONTENT ONLY that would be super intriguing to students and really draw them into the content. As Hope King always says, make sure you don’t do room transformations too much, otherwise it loses the magic.

    My goal was to create real world lessons exposing students to various career opportunities to assist with not only teaching difficult content but to accelerate students language skills and support the four domains of reading, writing, speaking and listening. You can check out all of the room transformations I have done by visiting my Instagram page. (@enlighteningells) My most recent room transformation was a construction worker theme. In math, we have currently been learning about area and my students have been really struggling with this concept. I wanted to expose my students to the engineering process and show them how in real life construction workers don’t just immediately begin building. My students learned that when building a house, a floor plan is carefully planned out with precise calculations and they did just that for this lesson! For me, I have found that my ELLs  are much more comfortable during room transformation lessons and their affective filter has been lowered because they are not only experiencing something different than our daily routine, but these lessons simulate a play environment. So often as teachers, we are constantly told to be on pace in our curriculum and always thinking about the next test. I may teach eight-year-olds, but trust me, they know their data and they definitely feel it too! Yes, staying on pace and testing is important, but my goal this school year was to create learning experiences keeping all of these things in mind but in a low anxiety play environment where kids can relax and ultimately be kids without all of the added pressure.

    I have noticed a few things so far. My attendance rate has gone up....especially on room transformation days. In past years, if my students were having a difficult time on a particular topic, they would stay home. Now that I teach difficult content with a room transformation, my students make sure not to miss it! My students are more likely to share their thinking in complete sentences, especially in their L2 when real world projects are incorporated into our learning. During the construction worker lesson, my students created floor plans that they were extremely proud of! When I asked them to share, they were so excited to be given the opportunity to talk about this piece of work but they work so hard on During the construction worker lesson, my students created floor plans that they were extremely proud of! When I asked them to share, they were so excited to be given the opportunity to talk about this assignment that they worked so hard on. Overall, my students do not feel nervous when being asked to share out because our environment is extremely low stress and the students know that we are all on our own learning journey and that’s okay! We are all here to support one another and give kind, specific and helpful feedback.

    If you are thinking about trying room transformations in your classroom, please keep in touch and let me know how it goes for you! I would love to hear about your journey. :)

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