Friday Reflections - ELs

I valued Francisco and Lucy’s presentation earlier this week on our ELs. District 100 is fortunate to have both of them who dedicate so much to helping all of us meet the needs of our ELLs. A special shout out to Francisco – he has the same back story as do many of our students - Francisco’s story is a great story of the American immigrant.  He grew up in Nicaragua speaking mainly Spanish and had to learn English while being immersed into the American culture. And now, Francisco is teaching us how to best support our EL students. Bravo, Francisco – you have some “creds” on the subject of ELs. 

Francisco and Lucy’s presentation included a wealth of information – much of the information I have heard before, but I have to admit that I need more exposure to how ELLs learn the language of school. Studies suggest that it take five to seven years for students to become proficient in learning academic English.

Lucy and Francisco ended their presentation with two questions “What is one Aha” and “What do you want to know more about?” 

An “Aha” is that so many of our ELLs have picked up English fairly quickly – I hear them in the lunchroom, hallways, playground – so many have learned sufficient English to interact socially and that’s wonderful – but these same students struggle with the complex academic language.  And, “What do I want to know more about?” – I can see how such strategies as the many language supports Francisco and Lucy spelled out would help ELs, but I think we would all benefit from a deeper dive into how students struggle with translating more academic terms – like specific content area science word – a class of animals is not connected to school; think about how long it may take an ELs to figure the meaning of class as it relates to classification of animals.   In short, we need to consider the challenges our ELs students face in order to achieve academically; we need to unlock ways to help them learn the many facets of English. 

This quick video explains exactly and explicitly how an EL student might struggle with the concept of “drawing conclusions” and what this teacher did to help students understand the concept.   

Go to the bottom of the page and locate the big heading “Feature Video”; underneath that  click on the third picture that’s entitled “Assessment for ELs in the classroom”.   It’s worth watching.  Overall, the website is a good resource on meeting the needs of our ELs.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Slice of life

Good evening  I am curious about your own writing.  Do any of you have a writing practice, such as, journaling?  Just wondering.  If I were a betting man, I’d put money on it that many of you do have a writing habit of sorts – if not now, perhaps earlier in life.  Please consider sharing a posting with us – or even on the bigger stage of Two Writing Teachers Blog. Last week I talked about the blog – Two Writing Teachers. This blog offers us the opportunity to share a piece of our own writing on pretty much any subject. You will find the means to do that under “Slice of Life” .  Just wanted to throw this out to anyone so inclined.  I’m going to push myself to post something.  Courage, right?    At any rate, my thoughts on writing focused on Heart Maps or Close to the Bone maps.  It seems to me that such a map would be beneficial for different writing responses, and most especially when we require students to write t...
Read more

Valentines Day

Carpe diem!  Happy Valentine’s Day!   Kids – and boyfriends and girlfriends– and adults who have special relationships with kids - that would be grandparents, for sure, want to show some expression of their love.   We send our cards with hearts and Xs and Os – and many of us spend a few minutes reading the sentiment inside the card – the thought needs to be a good fit.  Why not take the time to compose our own message to our Valentine?   I have been reading a fair amount about using mentor texts to teach the craft of writing.  Lucy Calkins and Katie Woodray (Wondrous Words) continually advise us to really get to know several good books – like inside and out.  What are the “tricks” of their writing?   What are the craft elements the author weaves into the writing? Writing gurus are reminding us to stop when we are reading a well written passage - “Hey look at that.  Look at how she wrote that!”  Try to fig...
Read more

Mother's day

Here’s an idea -  Mother’s Day comes in this final month and all of us can conjure up how our students might write a message to probably the most important audience in their live – their Mom. I think most kids can hang their writing hats on the following idea. The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown could be used as a mentor text to show students how authors like Brown developed a message and to create a written Mother’s Day message for their own mothers.   Brown selects several mundane important things/events and builds the case for why each is important.  She opens giving a strong reason explaining why the thing/event is important. She continues building a case for its importance with several other reasons.  And she ends each description with the same sentence as the first.    Listen to the oral reading , and you will see and hear the effectiveness of the message that is set in a poetic rhythm. I have given you a verse using Margaret Wise Brown...
Read more