Anti-bullying website for elementary students 

I found this site that has free reading worksheets and short stories that are geared towards beginning ESL students reading levels. It incorporates lifeskills lessons as wells as geography, history, holidays, and famous Americans. It seems like a great resource for social studies. I actually found a worksheet with a camping theme to use with our "Camp-Reads-A-Lot" theme day we are doing tomorrow. This particular worksheet has a paragraph, true/false questions, personal questions, and a little writing section. I also found a worksheet about the American Flag, which is great, because we are studying American symbols. This worksheet has 3 paragraphs of information about the flag, true/false questions, and a Daily Oral Language type "correct the sentence" section. These aren't something I would use in isolation, but they are a great resource for adding to and differentiating instruction.

Second-Language Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary Learning with Multimedia Lee B. Abraham Hispania , Vol. 90, No. 1 (Mar., 2007), pp. 98-108 Published by: American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20063468 This article presents a research study where ESL students were put into 3 groups a control group, a forced look-up group, and a choice look-up group. The study was trying to find out if using multimedia would aide in the increase in vocabulary in ESL students. The study found that students in the control group had little vocabulary growth, but the students in the two other groups had the same percentage growth of 18%. When I first started reading this article, I was interested to see if using multimedia tools would increase the vocabulary. I was specifically interested in the use of technology. There is no differentiation about which types of multimedia are better. As I further read, I thought that the students who were given a choice of what to look up would make more growth, because they would be working off their own motivation, but the study showed that whether they were forced to look up words or had a choice, they made the same growth. This reinforces the importance of teaching my students to use context clues, but when that doesn't help, to learn how to use a dictionary and the computer to find the meaning for words.

This website allows you to create a "corkboard" page where you can link all your favorite websites for your students to use.

http://www.symbaloo.com/mix/mrsfacineatoia?searched=true This is the link to the Symbaloo page I created!

This book is a compilation of ideas to teach ESL students in a whole group setting. It helps with differentiating instruction for all learners, but is specifically designed for teachers to meet the needs of ESL students in general education classrooms. The book is quite overwhelming with so many excellent strategies. I have found it easiest to focus on using one strategy at a time and practice using it until it becomes part of my routine.

There are 8 components to SIOP including: Preparation, Building Background, Comprehensible Input, Strategies, Interaction, Practice and Application, Lesson Delivery, and Review and Assessment. Some of the strategies given can be used in different components, but all of the components have strategies to use. Some of the strategies are done with the students and some are done ahead of time to help the lesson be more meaningful to ESL students, and they work well for all students. This book is really all about building your teacher bag of tricks to help all students learn!

There are lots of vocabulary activities and one that I am practicing is having the 4 corners of the classroom labeled and a stack of vocabulary words. Students each get a word and they have to figure out which corner their word goes to. This is great for sorting for word endings, different categories for a topic, types of grammar... the list goes on!

Amazon Link:

http://www.amazon.com/Ideas-Activities-Teaching-English-Learners/dp/0205521061/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329164788&sr=8-1

PowerPoint that talks about OLD and some techniques to use including vocabulary development activities. Describes the 3 tiers of vocab words as well.

Love Steve Peha, he writes like he speaks! Very interesting blurb about teaching reading in the content areas. I like that I am trying to focus more on non-fiction in my room, as was mentioned here, but realized I need to really make it explicit the differences between reading fiction and non-fiction.

Great article that sums up differentiated instruction and further gives suggestions on how to differentiate instruction for math. 

This article, I found on www.lauracandler.com explains how one teacher with limited resources for chapter books, downloaded a Kindle app to all the computers she has available to her classroom and pays the Kindle price for a book and it can be pulled up on all those computers... at the same time. She even uses it as whole group hooked up to her projector.

This article gives excellent advise on how to step-by-step teach non-fiction writing to ELLs. It gives tips on do's and don't's and reasons why things work and don't work when teaching students new to the country that are especially helpful for grades 3 and up. I believe strongly that reading and writing need to be linked to have meaning for students. As we teach reading in our content areas, we also need to teach writing skills to go with those reading skills.

The article says that most ELL students who had schooling in their former country will try to write in their own language and then translate into English and this becomes problematic, because the formats of sentence structure do not match in most languages. I don't really have this problem, but understand how this could become a problem. I do have the problem of sentence structure with the way my students speak, therefore when they write, the sentence structure is not proper. The article gives a step-by-step guide starting with organizers to teach non-fiction writing. I really liked the fact that it said to use sentences in the organizers. I have been using organizers with my class and trying to teach them to write fragments and then write the sentences later and found that problematic. I thought that I was trying to teach them to get their ideas on paper quicker, but after reading the article believe that it would be easier to teach them to write the proper sentence in the organizer and then transfer it to paper.