Tuesday, April 6, 2010

When I Grow Up

When I grow up: a young person's guide to interesting & unusual occupations, by Jessica Loy is an excellent book for students learning about professions. It has all the features I look for in a book for students whose language skills are limited. The reasons why I highly recommend this book for instruction are:

1. The vocabulary is rich, explicit and clear. Clear being the key word here because the pictures and the order of ideas and images makes perfect sense. You can read just the pictures captions and learn a new word.

2. Each profession is portrayed in a way that we can see what are the skills you may want to have to do that job. Each person/persons featured give little hints or advice about the kinds of skills they must have in order to do their job well. This particular aspect of the book is useful for ELL students because it facilitates the discussion of skills and what they are important. This book is a great tool to explain how if you like building things like the set designer featured in the book for example, you may find that skill will be the key to your success as a professional just as he did.

3. Every time you turn the page, you find a person featured as his/her profession. There is a brief mini-biography. The main body of the text consists of a succinct explanations of the tasks and responsibilities this particular job entails. These two pieces are clear and concise, yet full of rich language that weaves the students as they read hooking them directly to the new terms pertaining to the specific job.

4. Pictures, pictures, pictures! The pictures are wonderful!

1 comment:

  1. Awesome book recommendation. I teach HS newcomers and truly believe that age doesn't matter when it comes to picture books. For students new to the English language the rich language and explanations complete with pictures is an ideal way to teach about interesting occupations. Like you said... pictures, pictures, pictures! That's the ESL way to go.

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