Barking Dogs

Last week I found out that I had to add an extra responsibility to my plate by deciding which route to take for the CTEL/CLAD certification that I need to acquire here in Cali. This CLAD thing is basically a Cultural Language and Diversity certification that will enable me to teach English Language Learners...which we all know will greatly help me in this new Spanish speaking community. Lisa and Kristin and I all decided to take the classes that help prepare for a test that we will all take in December. This seemed like the cheapest and least stressful route to take, and we do have each other to help study and what not. Anyway, the downfall is that these classes are 6 hours per week from now until the end of November!! It is every Monday and Tuesday, and I even have a book to read and homework for the class. It is like college all over again!

So, in this clas we are talking about the study of learning another language (English) and its elements...linguistics in a nutshell (Annie, I know you are thinking about Bill Spruiell right now!) One of the things we have been discussing is semantics and that ELL students don't understand sayings, and figures of speech and the meanings of other like phrases. If you are going to use these type of things you need to make sure they are fully explained, otherwise students become very confused and disconnected...this brings me to today's activity....

We read this little article in a Current Science magazine about the Marathon Man and what his goal is and how he can run so long and blah, blah, blah...then we did this "Step Up To Writing" activity with it (I'm supposed to connect in all these strategies the district is paying for)...not the point...anyway, the article talks a lot about the supination and pronation of the feet when you run and your feet strike the ground. There was a picture of three sets of feet and it was showing this concept...however the caption read "Dogs on a roll." I took this to be a teachable moment where I actually used some of my CLAD info and applied it at school!

I asked the students why this caption said "dogs" when they never even talk about dogs in the article? There were a variety of hilarious answers but no one had ever heard of the phrase, "My dogs are barking" to mean your feet hurt. I helped the students make the connection (by of course using the fact that I often wear flip flops in class because my heels hurt the dogs) and many of them wrote in their writing piece that they learned that people sometimes call feet, dogs... I thought it was funny that out of all the things they could choose to write about...they wrote about the barking dogs!