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Maximize your Planning Period with a Simple Strategy
Hello educators! Welcome back and I hope you had an amazing week teaching your ELLs. Before we dive into the topic of the week, I want to encourage you to reflect on the week and write down some of your wins and areas of growth. This week week I am going to share with you how to apply a business strategy to your lesson planning. There is never enough time as educators. If we aren’t making copies, we are doing paperwork. Then, add planning for our students on top of all of that. Some teachers have reported planning can add an additional 10 hours to their work week. Not having…
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Building Background Knowledge through Picture Books
Hey educators! Welcome to today’s training. This week has been amazing. As the year is at the halfway mark, I am starting to see the work and lessons I did at the beginning of the year payoff. For example, I was teaching my students sentence structure. This week they were doing such a great job. This is important because my goal is to have the students write varied sentences. Today I am going to share with you how you can use picture books to teach complex topics. A lot of times our ELLs might not have the background knowledge around topics and events that will help them comprehend complex texts.…
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Refreshing Your Mindset
Hey educators! Welcome to today’s mini training. I hope every one of you has had an amazing week at school and thank you for all your hard work as educators. In today’s mini-training we are going to learn how to refresh our mindset for the second semester. If you are stuck and need to refresh your mindset then I have a FREE mini-training just for you. It will include a guide and videos on how you can refresh and renew your ESL classroom. In this FREE mini-training you will have each video delivered to your inbox. Click here to get your Reflect & Refresh course. During the second semester, school…
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Teaching Grammar & Punctuation without the Guilt
Hey everyone! Welcome and I hope you all had a fantastic week at school. This past week was our first week back at school, and I didn’t realize how much I missed my ELLs. I would love to hear about your 1st week back adventures. Have you ever been confused on how to include grammar in your lessons? While you might not want to do standalone grammar lessons, there are so many engaging ways you can include grammar in your lessons. So try not to shy away from grammar lessons with your ELLs, embrace them. As with many teachers, I usually learn about my student struggles through my “teacher radar”…
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Advocating for the Arts
Welcome everyone! I know everyone is excited to get back to their students and hit the ground running tomorrow. I am personally excited to come back more focused and determined. When I return I plan on reviewing some classroom procedures and refocusing the students. There are a lot of huge events for my students, such as concerts and art shows so I am very excited for them as well. A far to common problem that I am noticing is that ELLs are sometimes denied the opportunity to participate in the Fine Arts or Exploratory classes due to scheduling. It breaks my heart when I hear these stories because ELLs deserve…
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Plan Engaging Winter Lessons
Hey teachers! I hope you had an amazing holiday, and I am so excited that you are here this evening. In today’s blog I will be providing you some ideas for some winter lesson activities that you can use for your ELLs. It’s that’s time of the year and you might be planning for your second semester, and have no idea of what you plan to teach. This can lead to frustration and cause a planning mental block. At the beginning of the second semester, I take time and plan for the new year. Last year as I was planning….I got stuck! I had a mental block and couldn’t come…
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Increasing ELLs Listening Skills
Has there ever been the situation where you have had to repeat yourself over and over again for your ELLs? There have been times when I have been like “I know have said this 5.5 times, and they still are not listening and understanding. If this is you, my fellow teachers you might have a problem in your students listening comprehension. This can affect the students comprehension skills and assignments if they are struggling in this language domain. I always thought the listening domain was the easiest for students to achieve high scores and success. I mean all it is students listening and following directions. This is where my thought…
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Writing Strategies for your ELLs
Hey everyone! I am so happy you stopped by today to learn some writing strategies to support your ELLs in writing. A lot of us ESL teachers want to regularly assess our ELLs in Writing however sometimes we get stuck on how to monitor the students progress. It can also be overwhelming to find the supports the students need to be successful. There is also a component where we need to be consistent with when and how were are implementing speaking and writing assessments. A few years ago I was providing my students a writing assessment. I had an eye-opening moment. I noticed the students were stuck and confused about…
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ELLs and Data Binders
First I want to thank you so much for stopping by to learn how you can implement data binders with your ELLs.. There is so much data thrown at us as teachers. There are instances when we as teachers can feel as if we are doing an assessment a week. One struggle is presenting this data to our students, so they can break it down to hone in on their strengths and areas of growth. Three years ago I was so frustrated with how much we were testing. I felt as if every three weeks I was adjusting my schedule to accommodate the testing schedule. Furthermore the students were asking…
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The Power of Novel Studies
So many new ESL teachers ask what do I teach my ELLs. I always answer with the same curriculum you would teach any student. You simply add the scaffolds and differentiate for your student needs. Now if you are still stuck novel studies are a great way to make planning out your curriculum easier. The current curriculum that is implemented at my school is centered around novel studies. I’ll be the first to admit it makes planning so much easier for ELLs. I can add visuals, videos, graphic novels, non-fiction text and so much more to supplement the novel. PLUS there is usually tons of free materials out there to…
