Planning for ELs

Have you ever thought to yourself, I wish I knew how to reach my English Learners (ELs)? No matter what I do, they don’t seem to understand anything. If you have ever been in that position, it is not uncommon. I ask myself this or a similar question almost daily. But as an educator I can’t stop there so i need to plan better. One of my jobs as an EL teacher is to teach students academic language to be successful.

When planning lessons for ELs the learning experiences should try to include as many language modalities as possible. Below is a guide from Lincoln Public Schools in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Asking those three questions above helps provide an outline of the lesson which will help plan for the academic language used in the lesson and the activities that will be used to help create engaging learning experiences.

“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

We are the bridge to support our ELs academic language learning. If specific focus is not given to the language that is used in all content areas, ELs will not reach their full potential.

In a blog post by Doug Lemov (author of teach like a champion) he highlights how a teacher has students replace general words used to describe a scene from Othello with more academic vocabulary just by having it written on the board  and having the students refer to to it for their verbal responses.

How simple is that. It probably only took thirty seconds to write on the board, but think of the impact it will have on their learning. The students are already analyzing a complex story so why make it more difficult by having the students refer back to their memories those words.  They are in the process learning those words. Learning is messy.  If you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t learning fast enough.

1. Plan for that academic vocabulary and concepts that cross content areas.
   
2. Organize the learning experiences.
   
3. Use as many language modalities as possible.

Lincoln Public Schools ELL Instructional Strategies

Planning for ELLs with SWRRL

Hacking Writing: Part 2

Recently I joined a chat based on minecraft. I have been interested in using games as a way pique student interest in writing. During the chat I was given some great advice. The advice was that I could have the students take screenshots of their minecraft game (or online or offline game with a camera) and have the students annotate the pictures.

Instantly, I was hooked.I thought to myself, how could this work in my classroom? I just recently received five iPads in my room that will be shared with another colleague. Therefore I could setup stations in my room for students to be able to do this during school. Students who do have access to games and technology could save their screenshots to google drive and have them ready during class. If students don’t have time outside of school, I am sure they would be more than willing to do this briefly during class. Win Win, right?

I did have to figure out hot to take a screenshot on a desktop. This wasn’t hard to find out how to do. Just a quick Google search. The students were amazed when I began talking about doing this in class. Image never heard so much enthusiasm coming from my students about what games could we use; when will we be doing this; what do we get to write about? 

They could annotate with Canva, Google slides, Shadow Puppet,  or Adobe Spark just to name a few. To further add more variety and language modalities (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) to this project a podcasting app could be used in conjunction with the above mentioned apps. This repetition is especially critical for ELs to move toward proficiency.