EL Happenings
Volume 4 Issue 5
Writing
Phonics
Research
Teacher Feature
For this month’s issue, we take a look at Mary Bryan’s EL department. Nicki Little, Rachel Parker, and Stephanie Sherman model EL Excellence everyday with their students. They are highly collaborative, they design engaging, rigorous lessons, and scaffold instruction so that all students participate and perform at a high level because of their high expectations (yes! Including Level 1 and newcomers!)
One section of their program features first grade students engaging in rigorous writing instruction for one half of the class, then they switch to phonics instruction for the other half. Nicki and Stephanie switch students at the halfway point. All students were learning new words associated with the life cycle of a pumpkin (i.e. blossom, stem). Students were prompted on how the word might be spelled, and then each student wrote the word as Nicki modeled the thinking, and writing.
Another time in their services, Rachel modeled research projects for students, and then they applied these new skills to their own projects.
Wonderful examples of EL Excellence every day! Thanks Mary Bryan team!
If you want to know more about EL Excellence Everday, click the pic below.
Teacher Takeaway
"Students' receptive vocabularies can be at least two grade levels higher than their expressive vocabularies."
So keep reading complicated text with demanding vocabulary to your students!
How do we increase our students' expressive or productive vocabularies? You guessed it - they need to read, write, and speak those vocabulary words. Use vocabulary in context instead of isolation. Need some new ideas to help get out of the vocabulary instruction rut? See some of the links below - these are good for ALL students and can be adapted for ALL levels and content:)
Compliance Corner
WIDA resources designed to get your students ready for ACCESS
Teachers can help prepare students to take ACCESS for ELLs (Online, Paper and Kindergarten).
You can start doing the following three things now to prepare students ahead of the testing window which begins Jan. 13th -Feb. 28:
Grade 1, Tier A: Indoor Play
Grade 1, Tier B/C: Making Bird Feeders
Grades 2-3, Tier A: Flowers at the Park
Grades 2-3, Tier B/C: Our Town
2. Familiarize students with the kind of content they will encounter on the test and give them a chance to practice the different question types. This video blog describes how to use the WIDA rubrics for speaking and writing to better target instruction and monitor student progress. You can also check out these Writing Test Tips from WIDA.
While you may have some of your own ideas for getting students prepared, WIDA offers several resources to assist you, from tip sheets to practice tests. Nichole and JJ have also worked with a few buildings to practice the speaking format through a Canvas module and evaluate content by looking at test sample items. Please reach out to them if you would like to learn more.
District EL Coaches
JJ Tidd
Email: jtidd@perryschools.org
Twitter: @JJTidd
Nichole Seal
Email: nseal@perryschools.org
Twitter: @NicholeSeal2