Learning with PWIM at école Hawrylak school

I've been fortunate to work with two teachers at École Hawrylak - Ms. Picard (gr 2 French Immersion) and Ms. Robertson (gr 2/3 French Immersion).  Both of these teachers have begun working with the PWIM strategy (Picture Word Inductive Method) (en français - MIMI - Méthode Induction Mots 

Images).

In their classrooms, these teachers have gone through the process of shaking out words, creating and working with word cards, and have recently begun modelling the classification process.  I have  blogged about the process through my own blog and you can read about their work by clicking on the links below.

Introduction to PWIM - the first steps

Learning with PWIM - using word cards

Learning with PWIM - moving on to classification

 

Organizing according to attributes (gender and number)

See- Say - Spell

Some of the highlights from working with PWIM (especially with a focus on second language instruction) include:
- Student engagement and ownership (this is evident in the shaking out process as each child takes ownership over at least one word).
- Active learning: students are all engaged in various ways.  Students are manipulating their word cards, organizing according to their attributes, and working in flexible groupings.
- PWIM ties in to the structure of the daily five - students are doing word work, and the stamina that students have developed, alongside the appropriate behaviors for reading, listening and working help focus students on the task in question
- Allows for scaffolding and modeling - students work up to classification after extensive modeling on the part of the teacher
- Many extension & adaptation opportunities - differentiation is easily done by manipulating various aspects of the lesson.
- So many opportunities for second language learners-  moments to review and reinforce appropriate structures and pronunciation.
- Teachable moments that appear at every moment (in french - the liaison, gender, number, understanding articles, phonics for classifying,)
- Student choice (How am I spelling my words today?  How have I chosen to classify my words?)

 Our next steps with PWIM, after extensive modeling, will be to begin creating titles for the image, adding to the word cards, and eventually, moving into writing sentences and paragraphs.

The scaffolding afforded by the process helps even struggling learners to develop from identifying words to writing.  I look forward to continuing on this process with these two amazing teachers!