We are going to start off today’s blog with your reflection question. How are you including vocabulary activities in your current lessons? Take a moment to reflect on this question. Think about this question and answer to yourself honestly where you stand.  Vocabulary building is such an important part of supporting our Language Learners. An obstacle that many of us face is finding engaging ways to include this in our daily lesson planning. We want to take time for building vocabulary, but the activities seem repetitive and dull to our students.  As I was teaching a writing activity, I noticed the students were stuck on the vocabulary “good” and “bad”.…

I was waiting anxiously to see how my students had performed on the language proficiency assessment. I knew after a year of hard work my students were the best in the state. After looking at the data from ELLs I knew I needed to make an immediate change. I was teaching my heart out, but the data was not in line with it. I could not figure out what in the world I was doing wrong. Was it my instruction? Was I not being intentional with the data? Was I analyzing the wrong data? I spent half the summer breaking down the data, but I still did not understand where…

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…