It’s a new year and with that often comes New Year’s Resolutions. Why not try out new things with your students as well this year? Larry Ferlazzo always has awesome ideas and tips for teaching ELLs. His post “Four “New” Activities I Am Doing Next Week With My ELL Newcomer Class” is a great one to check out, especially if you service newcomers and want to try some new activities in 2020.
Category: Technology Resources
Using Songs to Teach-Premade Lessons and Activities
I LOVE using songs to teach my students, especially my English Learners. I can still recite Fifty Nifty United States and other songs I learned in Elementary school (and that was a LONG time ago)! This website has wonderful lesson plans for different songs, a category that describes activities that can be used to target different skills using songs, and perhaps my favorite category, Grammar + Songs. Using popular songs to teach grammar makes learning more authentic and engaging for our students, making it more likely that they will apply these grammar rules in their own writing. This is a website you will want to add to your favorites bar!
Looking for resources to get the same text written at different? Look no more.
Larry Ferlazzo’s educational blog is packed full of goodies for teachers. This post of Larry’s is one of my favorites because it has multiple websites that offer engaging text at different levels. It can be tough to differentiate to meet multiple language levels within your classroom, while keeping all students on the same topic, but there are tons of FREE websites out there that do just that! Some of my favorites that he shares are: NEWSELA, CommonLit, and Breaking News English. One downfall to Breaking News English are the ads that pop up, but if you are willing to sift through the site, I recommend the 2-page mini lessons (they are printable) and the online activities.
21st Century Skills-Keys to Success
There are many skills, mindsets, and dispositions that our students need to be successful in a global society where technological advances are changing the way we learn, interact, and communicate. Sometimes it is hard to know where to start when teaching our students 21st century skills. The following links provide mini-lessons and a power point to teach various 21st century concepts such as global awareness, innovation, initiative, problem solving, creativity, empathy, collaboration, and adaptability.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y01-z3QXlYBiDTbMdQjUsPK9p4JTc4t_/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vMUf6Wco1ZBLzY1Fk0U19CzQJ47OSZWh/view?usp=sharing
Self-Assessment Handouts
Self-assessment has numerous benefits and helps students take responsibility for their own learning. ELLs should have opportunities to reflect, in their home language and in English, on the processes and products of learning content within language and language within content. The link below, from the book Seven Strategies for Assessment for Learning, has a few of my favorite, kid friendly, self assessment tools.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IpYLtjb_Z9eHtaETMvuX7dxswx6GFdMI/view?usp=sharing
PIES-The Four Basic Principals for Cooperative Learning
Having a student centered classroom where students are working cooperatively isn’t only engaging, it is purposeful. It gives students opportunities to interact with one another and practice the critical skills of communication and problem solving, which is essential for our ELLs. Kagan cooperative learning structures are a wonderful way to facilitate the teaching and learning of any content. The link below highlights the steps for a few of my favorite Kagan structures to use in my classroom.
Link to Kagan Structures
Did you know you can access your ESL student’s PSPs, accommodations report, WIDA can-do descriptors and more, all on Infinite Campus?
Click on the link below for an LEP Infinite Campus Cheatsheet.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GHWPrpiCbeJcoKEtU5EGMxuiCSpdF0VR/view?usp=sharing
Do you want to teach about refugees in your classroom, but you don’t know where to begin or how to make it age appropriate? I have the solution for you!
The UN Refugee Agency has created the UNHCR Teachers’ Toolkit. It has free-of-charge and adaptable UNHCR teaching materials on refugees, asylum, migration and statelessness, and a section dedicated to professional development and guidance for primary and secondary school teachers on including refugee children in their classes.
https://www.unhcr.org/teaching-about-refugees.html
Credit is due to Dr. Broady’s Blog, which is where I found this incredible resource.
The SIOP Method: Strategies and Supplemental Materials
The SIOP (sheltered instruction observation protocol) method also focuses on the use of strategies in the classroom. This video does a great job explaining the difference between teaching strategies and learning strategies, and also gives great examples of cognitive versus metacognitive strategies.
Graphic organizers are an excellent way to get your students to organize their ideas when reading for different purposes. I love the way these organizers are created for specific reading strategies and how the strategies are explained in detail. Click the link below to see this awesome resource!
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1nGWuzKajOQbA4sZtByg7XsjCjn2UHqUW
Supplemental materials are essential to the success of our CLD students. Teaching students to identify text structures and write using these structures can be very challenging. I use an anchor chart like the one below with my students and also have gestures for each structure. When reading expository text, we refer to the anchor chart and use the gestures to identify the structures we come in contact with. In addition, I love using these sentence frames with my CLD students as a support when they are asked to write with specific structures. Click on the link below to check them out.
The CALLA Method and Importance of Strategies
The CALLA (cognitive academic language learning approach) method focuses on explicitly teaching language learners to understand and apply metacognitive, cognitive, and social/affective strategies (Chamot, 2009; Chamot & O’Malley, 1994). This brief video discusses the why and the how of cognitive and metacognitive strategies and includes some great graphics.
Having your students annotate the text while reading is a great way for them to monitor their thinking and understanding. I love this “Meta” anchor text that has simple symbols that can be used to annotate while reading, leading to greater comprehension.
I really like this document because each reading strategy has sentence stems/starters to go with it. This could be a great resource for our CLD students when providing prompts to get them talking about what they are reading and the strategies they are using.
Buchanan's Blog-Tips for Teachers of ESL Students 