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When you have students from many different ethnic and religious backgrounds in your classes, it is super important to be aware of the impact your teaching during the holiday season can have. Many schools put up displays for Christmas and Chanukah in administrators’ offices and many teachers like to decorate
Thomas Carlyle said, “Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.” Oftentimes English Learners are silent in school and won’t talk for an extended period of time. Teachers need to understand that this is a normal part of second language acquisition–it’s a concept called the Silent Period.
My professors in grad school emphasized the importance of developing schema among English Language Learners. Schema is the fancy word for background knowledge. (And schemata is the plural.) ELLs who are immigrants or who grow up in the U.S. immersed in cultures that are not the dominant American culture often
I had to make a special effort to get the parents of my English Language Learners involved in school activities. Not knowing English, or thinking they didn’t know it well enough, kept a lot of the parents of my ELLs from attending parent-teacher conferences. A lot of my students’ parents
Not all students are lucky enough to have parents who have the time and knowledge to help their children do homework. In addition to not knowing enough English to help their children complete homework assignments, many parents and other caregivers of ELLs have to work during the afternoons and evenings
Quick – after you say hello and get your students settled in your classroom and ready to learn, what’s the next thing you should do? If you said: Go over the written objectives for the lesson, you’re right! You’re probably familiar with the SWABT formula, which is Students Will Be
The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others. Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/help_others.html?vm=l The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others. Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/help_others.html?vm=l I would like to let you
Let’s practice motivation and love, not discrimination and hate. Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/hate.html?vm=l Following the events in Charlottesville, Virginia this past weekend, I thought it might be helpful to post some resources you can use with your students to help them address the tragedy and its aftermath. In the references
One of the things I liked most when I was a classroom teacher was collaborating with other teachers. Co-teaching in a mainstream classroom, designing lessons and projects with regular and special ed teachers, discussing the progress — or lack thereof — of ELLs, and jointly figuring out what grades to
Whew! I just got home yesterday from the 4th annual TeachersPayTeachers Conference. Lasting for 3 days, it ran from early Monday afternoon through Wednesday night in Anaheim, California. But since I have family in Los Angeles, I visited my relatives afterwards, which is why I didn’t get home until Sunday.
Continuing with last week’s focus on teaching academic subject matter to English Language Learners, this week I am recommending a textbook series rather than an individual book. Each book in the series deals with an academic subject and I have used 3 of the 5 books with my students. (You
So far, the books in my Summer Reading Recommendations series have dealt with designing effective lessons for English Language Learners. In today’s post, I’d like to get more specific and talk about a book that actually teaches academic subject material. Teaching academic content to ELLs isn’t easy, especially if they
