Building our students capacity to learn starts with educators. If the educator sets out to learn about their students' community and culture, interests and needs, than they will inherently plan accordingly, including rich content with progression and regression built in. They will provide students with opportunities to practice, support and the opportunity to build upon prior skills. The educator will set the tone by not only meeting with the student and parent but with other teachers who come in contact with the student, administration and outside community networks. By including and building knowledge through all facets, only then will we have fully supported all students in our ELL programs.
This is an artifact from the building capacity series ELL
voices in the classroom, available here , outline a method of introducing ways to communicate
with one another in the classroom in a positive and constructive manner. This document is a great resource as a whole
but what I liked was it’s attempt to not only provide information on the “why”
but also the “how” on including ELL’s in your classroom and how to create the
best learning platform for those ELL’s.
This segment highlights one of those hows and compliments a great
starter in your classroom for all students with or without an ELL student,
however it creates a great opportunity to model language for the students who
may not have it yet and provide them the opportunity for repetition. Teaching primary students this little graph
stuck out to me as a great opening activity for all students, but in a unique
way allows the ELL to find modeled language in the classroom to repeat and
build upon.
This is a piece from Understanding Second Language
Acquisition: A guide to teaching in Multilingual classrooms. It reflects on the acquisition of first
language and extends into learning a second language through imitation and
habit formation. At an early age
children hear and repeat sounds at home and in their play. By exposing children to a plethora of
different sounds it increases their awareness and therefore the opportunity for
repeating these different sounds. I
chose this as an identifier to us as educators to highlight how often we may be
repeating the same sounds to young learners, especially ELL’s and ensure that
we are ranging our words and vocabulary choice around them to expose them to
the great number of phonetic combinations that exist. This document also highlights our role as
teachers of ELL’s to create modeled habits for our students, such that they
are hearing and reproducing correct pieces.