The Correct Way to Spell Potato

Worldwide Woofs

Polite Speech

In ELD, we have to explicitly teach polite speech. For many newcomers, it is some of the first language we teach, but after that first year, how often do we reinforce what we've already taught? Here's a video from Kid President and Soul Pancake about "20 Things We Should Say More Often". It is full of all of the good stuff you want kids to remember to say ( for ELs, this video is especially helpful, because the words he's telling us to say get written on the chalkboard behind him) and a few of the light-hearted things people say that make the video awesome for all kids, EL, mainstream, or otherwise. Enjoy and Happy Thanksgiving!

Trying Out Blended Learning in ELD

Monolingual VS Bilingual

Explore more infographics like this one on the web's largest information design community - Visually.

The Benefits of Being Bilingual

Breaking News English

Breaking News English
http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/

This site has over 1750 free lessons on current events for English Language Learners. Many of the lessons would work well for Below Level Learners as well. The lessons are marked as "easier" or "harder" with activities geared for several levels (U.K. EL levels of 0-6, with "easier" being 0-3 and "harder being 4-6). These short articles are a good place to start if you are looking to incorporate more informational text into your lessons. The articles cover a wide variety of topics, from science, to politics, to lifestyle news.

NEW English Language Development Standards for California Public Schools

A couple of resource links for you on the new ELD Standards for California... Just some light reading ;)

ELD Overview and Proficiency Level Descriptors

English Language Development Standards for Grade 7

English Language Development Standards for Grade 8

We will continue using CELDT (California English Language Development Test) as an assessment until the ELPAC (English Language Proficiency Assessment for California) is made available (2015?).

California English Language Development Standards - Implementation Plan (Sept. 2013)

Google Translate App for Android

 Alrighty! My first YouTube video ever! Enjoy (because it might be my last! lol)!

Spotlight on Instructional Coaching: For English Language Learners, Ramon Vijil, Rose Elementary

An excerpt from the last Ed. Services English Learner Newsletter

ELL Considerations for Common Core Aligned Tasks in English Language Arts

Adapted from NYC Dept. of Education

Scaffolding: A Tool to Accessibility

Scaffolding is a tool for our English learners to be access the rigor of the Common Core Standards; they need temporary scaffolds to help them access the curriculum. Knowing when to removing them when they are no longer needed is the key to their value for ELL’s.  Because students learn at their own pace one student may no longer need scaffolds, while another might still depend on them. Constant monitoring and evaluation of learning is critical in assuring that scaffolds are successfully used.

Scaffolding types necessary for ELLs to access the core:

1. Modeling: finished products of prior students’ work, teacher-created samples, sentence starters/frames, writing frameworks, shared writing, etc.

2. Text representation: transforming a piece of writing into a pictorial representation, changing one genre into another, etc.

3. Building Schema: bridging prior knowledge and experience to new concepts and ideas, etc.

4. Activating and bridging prior knowledge and/or experiences: using graphic organizers, such as anticipatory guides, extended anticipatory guide, semantic maps, interviews, picture walk discussion

protocols, think-pair-share, KWL, etc.

5. Metacognitive development: self assessment, think alouds, asking clarifying questions, using a rubric for self evaluation, etc.

6. Contextualization: metaphors, realia, pictures, audio and video clips, newspapers, magazines, etc.

Welcome!

Hi Everyone!

I am going to be posting my tips for helping your English Language Learners here in this blog. Please feel free to comment and ask questions on any post. If you have any useful resources that deal with the topic at hand, please post those, too! I will be keeping a running list of resources here:

https://docs.google.com/a/musd.org/document/d/1t1oFVqn8m-HGu7vICzQJ5jg-VfGpTjINsq07Bt1YRII/edit?usp=sharing

Currently, this list is only available to people at MUSD with the link, but if you're not part of MUSD and you'd like to take a peek, just let me know and I'll share it with you!

That's it for now!