Meanwhile, I’m over here

Teachers are like:

how i end up spending my PD days

Today I took a course at the field museum called:

Do You Speak Science? Using Objects to Develop ELL's Academic Language

It was a very interesting course. I have something like 23 of 28 students who are English Language Learners. I try to use as many objects and pictures as I can with my students and provide hands on opportunities. I was excited to see I was on the right track. I was most importantly impressed by the teacher of the course who is especially interested in English Language Learners who are misunderstood and placed in Special Needs classrooms. 

She emphasized the importance of not changing the content you teach to an ELL but to change the language you use. To demonstrate this she gave us a lesson using objects, and then we used similar objects in groups. She also spoke Spanish for the entire lesson of which no one in my group was fluent but had varied levels of understanding. 

We explored instruments and tried to fill out a chart about the instruments in Spanish. We were encouraged to use our native language to communicate and then given a vocabulary guide with pictures. This helped immensely to help learn the Spanish vocabulary for the objects, which were instruments and the terms for "to play" and, "high", or "low." So we participated in the activity through exploring the objects and matching the vocabulary. The lesson was about recording observations, and we met that objective while meeting a language objective of using new terms, both written and speaking.

I'm pleased to reflect on my previous post thinking "I did the right thing keeping the objective the same for the ELL student and using different language instead."