Using Mainstream Learning for Your Language Learners
Hello, teachers, and welcome to today’s episode. Today, we are going to be talking about using mainstream curriculum for your language learners. Now, before we jump into today’s topic, I want you to think about a “win” that you had over the last week. I want you to share those “wins” and celebrate those “wins”. And every week I want to highlight a teacher’s “win”. Remember, I always say that it can be big, it can be small.
A win is always a celebration, and I want to celebrate your wins with you. Our community, My Adventures in ESL, wants to celebrate the wins with you. And I want to encourage you to join the community. Now, if you have a win you want to share, you can always email me at millie@myadventuresinesl.com or share your wins in the community. Now, this week’s “wins” come from Laurie. Laurie is a K-2nd grade teacher in my program, the ESL Teacher Master Plan.
Over the past month, she has been working so hard setting up a plan for the school year, organizing her classroom, and doing everything that she can to have a successful school year. So congratulations to Laurie and I want you all to have a fantastic school year.
In today’s podcast episode, we are going to be talking about how you can use a mainstream curriculum for your language learners. I know many of us have the problem of not having the curriculum for our students. We often find ourselves asking this question: “Where can I find a curriculum for my language learners?” This is a big obstacle to overcome and it can set you back on preparing for the upcoming school year if you’re stuck on how you can prepare. Not having a curriculum can cause you to feel overwhelmed, it can lead you to printing out a massive amount of worksheets that have no purpose in your classroom and you can even see a decline in growth with your students because you don’t have the structure, or the plan that you need to move them to the next level.
Basically, you need the structure of a curriculum in your classroom.
Like many of you, I am in many groups for teachers who teach language learners, and in those groups, as I’m always scrolling, the biggest question that always pops up is: “Hey, do you have a curriculum for your language learners?” What curriculum are you using for your language learners? Then teachers jump on and they provide tons of resources for the teachers, but few are actually providing a curriculum. Few are actually providing a structure that is needed in your classroom.
A lot of times you see that same teacher return and then he asks, how can they plan for their students? How can they plan for their language learners? When I see these posts, I always wonder like, ” hmm, can they use a mainstream curriculum?” It’s completely doable. I know I’ve done it and you can use it as well. I know this because, like I mentioned, I spent the last two years teaching a mainstream curriculum to my language learners.
If you’re wondering what is a mainstream curriculum, I like to call it, it’s simply the curriculum that the English language arts teacher or the content area teacher for English Language Arts are teaching to the students, that same curriculum. I noticed after my language proficiency exam a few years ago, that I needed something more rigorous in my classroom. The school district was introducing a new curriculum, and I dived head-on in adapting this curriculum to the needs of my language learners.
I started to find supplementary text to accompany the text in the new curriculum. I also designed mini-lessons, I found videos to be a background knowledge to supplement and I even created activities to support my language learners. What I mean by that is I created activities for speaking, writing, listening, and reading some of those areas that they really needed growth in. I used the existing curriculum for the English Language Arts, and I just molded it into what I needed for my students.
Doing it this way also prepares the students for any upcoming assessments and helps them with those grade level standards. Because the mainstream curriculum addresses the grade level standards, which will be assessed on the end-of-the-year assessment that my students have to take. Guess what – once I started doing this, I started seeing tremendous growth in my students. It was off the chart!! Now, what I want you to know is that many schools have pacing guides and outlines of what to teach for the school year in regards to English language arts.
I would encourage you to use those guides as a blueprint in your classrooms of what to teach your language learners. This will help you with daily lesson planning and it will guide you in your yearly plans for the school year. I would also like to encourage you to collaborate with the current English language arts educators in your school. You can all plan together on what text and what skills that you’re going to teach the students every school year. And this is really important if you are co-teaching, that way you will have a say in what text to include, what skills to include and how to modify those skills for your language learners.
I also want you to review the mainstream curriculum and decide on how you can support your language learners. In other words, when you look at the mainstream curriculum, ask yourself what scaffolds and what supports can I put in place to make sure that my students are going to be successful? So, of course, you have some next steps and here are your steps. First, I want you to research and review your school’s Pacing and Curriculum Guide for the school year. Secondly, create your lessons and your topics around the curriculum guide the school is using for the E.L.A.. For example, if you see in the E.L.A. Curriculum Guide, they have a topic about rites of passage, then you can also have in your curriculum guide a topic about rites of passage. If you see that they are doing referencing for a skill, then you can do referencing. Align those curriculum guides, then work with other teachers in your building to decide on the text and skills that you’re going to be teaching this upcoming school year. So collaborate with those E.L.A. teachers.And lastly, decide on what supports that your language learners are going to need this upcoming school year.
I would like to know, how are you planning on using the mainstream curriculum this school year? What are some things, after hearing this podcast episode, that you would like to include in the mainstream curriculum? What I would like you to do is, join our community, My Adventures in ESL, share your ideas with the community. I would love to hear about them. The community would love to hear about them.
Once again, I want to thank you for dropping in on today’s episode, and I will see you all next week! Bye!
