Que? Shuh? Que Dijo? I constantly was hearing the words “what?” in a wide range of languages. My students were simply not speaking in English. I knew I need to make a drastic change. After attending a conference, I was introduced to Numbered Heads. It turned into such a huge success in my classroom. I can remember when I first tried it two years ago, and was thinking could this ever work for my newcomers. I am here to tell you that it works! It increases engagement and holds the students accountable during discussion time. I am here to explain how you can incorporate this activity for newcomer ELLs. This…

Yes. No. I see the dog. These are how my students sentence complexity was on a daily basis. At first I was okay with them speaking this way, as long as they were speaking. Year after year I noticed my students were not making significant growth on the end of the year language assessment. The problem was right in my face. I was not being intentional with my speaking lessons. I also realized my students were not speaking in compound and complex sentences. I was so excited to hear the ESL students speaking, that I wasn’t setting high expectations as to HOW the should be speaking. After some serious reflection,…

Target Talk in my classroom has completely transformed introducing learning objectives in my classroom. A learning objective tells what the student will be doing in class. Before students would simply say the target, and we would move on. Now when the students are talking about learning objectives, they actually dive into what the learning objective means. We often make connections and predictions to events in the world. Below are directions on how you can introduce Target Talk into your classrooms.  1.  Post the learning objective in kid friendly language. This is really important because you want the learning objectives to be accessible to the students. This also helps the students…