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This resource provides a list of 10 strategies to support English Language Learners (ELLs) in math. The best practices which stood out most to me are eliciting nonverbal responses when students need to demonstrate understanding, such as a simple thumbs up or thumbs down. This allows students to answer questions without having to produce the language. In addition, this resource supports my SMART target learning goal to support students with explaining how to solve for an unknown in an equation. The resource suggests using sentence frames so students can better participate in discussions, which also provides structure as students explain their mathematical thinking.

This article shows the success a group of schools have in teaching instruction when there is a purposeful, intimate focus on individual teachers. When teachers are given proper tools, instruction, and guidance, they will succeed in instructing students and therefore a greater percentage of students will have a better understanding of what is being taught.

Focused teacher development is needed to achieve student success! This is 100% true and this article talks about this in a great way. Great find!

I found this article helpful in the importance of providing individualized professional development to teachers so they are able to grow their practice around targeted skills students need to master.

This article is about alphabet knowledge in Pre-kindergarten and Kindergarten classroom. It went over different assessments to use to assess the proper way to demonstrate alphabet knowledge. This a great article to read. It talks about instructional approaches and how to shift to alphabet instruction that aligned with emphasis on assessments and differentiated instruction. I believe that would be good resources to help teach my students' letter sounds. This might also help me achieve my SMART target goal.

Dimension: Impact on Learning Rating: 3- Medium-high impact SMART Goals: By the end of the unit, 50% of students will score 70% or higher on the assessment. By the end of the quarter, 80% of students will obtain a 60% or higher in Algebra 1 By the of Unit 5, 80% of students will score at least 70% on the end of unit assessment In this activity, students take a gallery walk to view the multiple ways of solving a math problem and representing their math thinking. This type of activity allows for students to display their work in a non-threatening way. The students will be checking their understanding and learning other solutions for a given math problem. This activity could also meet the Math and Social Studies goals of my group because gallery walks can foster discussions where students explain their thinking and teach each other in the process.

This is a Wikki that thoroughly provides strategies to close the instructional and learning gap around the skill of understanding the main idea of Informational Text. The 6.2 tab was very helpful when thinking about ELL, SPED, and multiple modality instructional considerations.

This article provides both in classroom as well as online teacher resources to incorporate when teaching word problems to upper elementary aged students. It provides easy to implement strategies and an overview of why they are important.

A doctoral dissertation about enhancing writing at the elementary level. Teachers used an intensive 9 week writing program and observed the effects on the students' writing performance. Learning gaps with writing is very wide and instructional changes are made in order to help students write better. Cross-curricular instruction with writing is also emphasized in this study.

Dimension: Student Engagement Rate: 4 My SMART Target Learning Goal is that 80 % of my Pre-kindergarten class will master their reading foundation skills by the 3rd trimester. This EL Education video introduces the concept of interactive writing. This concept allows students to use spelling patterns and high frequency words. The video demonstrated how all of the students participate in tapping out the letter sounds. The students were engaged in the video and used different techniques were utilized to display how various students were engaged in learning. They used different learning tools including: sky writing, full body movements, body writing, sharing the pens and white boards. This relates to my SMART goal because my students need to be able to master reading foundation skills. This is a key component to reading foundation skills. I practice some of these techniques already but I want to try all of them to see if that will improve my students reading foundation skills.

Dimension: Rigor and Relevance Rate: 4 - students think and work My SMART goal is that students will be able to solve an on grade level math task, that will require them to respond and defend their work to explain their reasoning 3 out of 5 times by the end of the 1st marking period. This EL Education video shows a great model of how to use interactive writing with younger students. The reason I gave this a score of 4 is because although students are in a whole group setting they still were required to think and work. Students had to think and act out words or spellings. They worked as a class to write the sentence. It required students to think and help! While I think this is a great video, I don't really think it is something that could work for my SMART goal. Yes it relates to writing but I think that my students would need something a little more advanced for 4th graders. I think if students had this lesson taught to them at a younger age it would help them achieve this goal. I don't think this instructional tactic is something that would teach students how to defend and support their answer.

The following is a pdf file about how to integrate writing into mathematics. It is a fantastic resource from the Michigan Department of Education that addresses integrating Common Core skills into every subject area.

This article discusses the effects of learning targets on all people in the school - students, teachers, principals and central-office administrators. It goes on to describe ways to create an effective learning target and the actions necessary order to do so. Furthermore, it outlines the process of learning targets. Effective learning targets are able to help close the achievement gap!

Personal Finance is life skill that students will use from childhood into adulthood.

Students, by the time they are in high school, should hopefully be able to motivate themselves and be ready to take higher math classes like algebra, geometry and statistics. Unfortunately, in our American society many people have a fear of math and numbers, suffer from a lack of motivation and rarely have a strong foundation to stand on for the math skills required by high school courses.

In this blog, veteran Spanish teacher Mike Peto focuses on teaching Spanish to heritage speakers. Topics include how to break language shyness, games to encourage speaking in the classroom, and readings for heritage speakers. Mr. Peto insists that spelling and grammar improve through reading.

This online language learning platform uses gamification to motivate students and make language learning fun. It provides an individualized learning path (differentiation) to increase language proficiency. I have used Duolingo for my own language practice, for teaching my children languages, and in my classroom as a part of language instruction.

This is not an article but a diagram that shows how learning gaps in lower grades continue and get more pronounced as a student moves on. I felt that this was important to me because I teach 1st grade. As teachers we need to lessen the learning gaps early.

This article discusses how teachers can help every student move forward and experience success by anticipating possible gaps in knowledge and building scaffolds into each lesson to address these gaps. The author, Pepper Rollins (2016), describes a variety of tools to provide such support.

This article is very timely it talks about the NCLB law and how it isn't working. Threats to teachers firing, closing schools and students still continue to decline. Standardized testing isn't working. This is a great article, must read.

Article discusses how teachers can use data to drive instruction.

Compose specific questions that you will ask your students (or that you anticipate they will ask you). Doing so will help you increase student participation and encourage active learning. This article offers several helpful strategies for asking questions, responding to questions, and even provides a list of sample questions a teacher can ask to help students meet specific learning goals.