Reminders:

Saturday, November 28th 3-4pm: Burnaby Public Library Group Chat  Group Chat is a program for newcomer youth who want to meet other youth and practice speaking English. We will play games, connect, and discuss an interesting topic in a fun and friendly online group setting. Encourage your students to email teenservices@bpl.bc.ca for the zoom link.

Every Teacher is a Language Teacher

Learning Strategies for ALL Learners

Learning strategies will help English Language Learners access  more content and grow their academic capabilities. They will do the same for every student. Practice them consistently and all students will improve and develop.

Cognitive Learning Strategies

• previewing text
• establishing purpose
• making connections between self, texts, and world
• annotating text
• taking notes
• using graphic organizers
• reading aloud for clarification
• rereading for comprehension
• identifying key vocabulary

Metacognitive Learning Strategies

• predicting and inferring
• generating questions and using them to guide comprehension
• monitoring and clarifying (Do I understand?)
• evaluating and deciding significance
• summarizing and synthesizing
• visualizing

Reminders:

Tuesday, November 17th, 1-3pm: Elementary ELL meeting: We will welcome speakers from the Burnaby Public Library. A zoom link has been emailed.

Every Teacher is a Language Teacher

The Importance of Effective Instructions

I really bombed recently. I had six students in an online class do a writing assignment comparing a real life hero to a character in a book. I explained the assignment and asked them to show it to me next class. None of them did it correctly. They wrote about why they respected the real life hero or gave a biography but no one mentioned the novel’s character. The first one could be caused by an inattentive student…but all of them? The problem was my instructions were unclear. I orally told them what to do and assumed they got it. I apologized for my mistake and we went over the assignment again. This time, I wrote step by step instructions on a shared document. Then, we brainstormed characteristics with a group chosen hero. Then, I wrote/co-wrote a model using the hero and one of the characters. Finally, I let them get to work. All of them were successful the second time.

Teachers need to have clear, scaffolded instructions for students. Oral instructions are rarely enough.

Reminders

Monday, November 2nd, 3:30-5pm: ELL Book Club: Big Ideas for Expanding Minds by Jim Cummins and Margaret Early-Chapter 4.

Thursday, November 5th, 3:30-5 pm: SIOP Lead Meeting: TEAMs

Tuesday, November 17th, 1-3pm: Elementary ELL meeting: We will welcome speakers from the Burnaby Public Library. Zoom link will be sent out closer to the date.

We hope you got some rest and respite on your Thanksgiving weekend. 

Three Ways that Fanny and Michelle Can Support You

1.  Answer your questions:  Email or message us on Teams is the best way to get a response.
2. Co-plan: You have an idea or a glimmer of an idea and you need a wall to bounce it off. Let us be that wall. We can even do it virtually!
3. Co-Teach: You want to practice your co-teaching skills or just need another person to pull off your unit.

Every Teacher is a Language Teacher

Using Supplementary Materials to Make Lessons Clear

Remember how your English teachers used to tell you to show, not tell in your writing assignments. It is also true when lesson planning for ELLs. Long oral instructions or long written text are a huge hurdle for someone learning a language (as well as many others). Instead, think about changing it up with some of these adaptations:

1. Demonstrations provide visual support and model how to be successful at an assignment.
2. Manipulatives reduce the language demands but every student, including beginning ELs, can participate. Online versions can be interactive activities.
3. Pictures are on the simplest language adaptations. Teach a new word, show a picture. This is especially true for abstract concepts. What picture would you show for “conundrum” or “antithesis”? Diagrams, charts, graphs are all also very useful.
4. Videos are the next level of visual scaffolds. Show it in class but then give students the links so they can watch it again at home as many times as they need. Youtube also has options to slow down the speed (very important if you’ve ever shown a Crash Course video), put on subtitles, or even translate.
5. Chapter summaries often are published by textbook companies. These allow students an overview which is shorter and more easily managed by students than pages and pages of text.

Virtual Pro-D Opportunity with Tan Huyhn

Coquitlam is offering a workshop with Tan Huyhn on Co-planning and Co-teaching  on October 23rd from 9-12pm. Tan is an international educator and RoyELLty. Burnaby has three spots available for what is sure to be an amazing workshop. We will be drawing two names so email Michelle to be put in the hat which will be pulled on Friday.

Every Teacher is a Language Teacher

Providing Age Appropriate and Educational Background for Students

While ELL students may not have the academic language to complete grade appropriate work, they often do have the academic knowledge in their home language. Students with interrupted schooling often have life experience that may give them background knowledge of content way beyond their years. Therefore, while we need to adapt the English language, we don’t change the content of the learning. Assignments where all students can access higher order thinking, despite English level is necessary.

When planning consider:

·         Student’s first language literacy skills

·         Student’s second language literacy proficiency

·         Student’s reading level

·         Cultural and age appropriateness of the information

·         Reading level of the content material

Then, you can make adaptations such as:

·         Mini-lessons to provide background knowledge that is missing

·         Texts adapted to teach high level content at low readability levels

·         Mini-lessons to teach important vocabulary

·         heritage language texts

Upcoming Dates

Acknowledgement

We want to thank all the ELL teachers, classroom teachers, secretaries, school support staff,  and administrators that pulled together to get initial assessments done. We needed cooperation, patience, and flexibility to get through it and you all showed extreme grace. You are awesome.

Reminders

ELL Elementary Teachers: There has been some shuffling of staff so please take 1 minute to fill out the survey listed in TEAMS so we have a list of who is where. Thank you!!!

September 30th, 2020 is the day we need to have all initial assessments, reassessments, AIPs completed and support provided and documented for all funding-eligible ELL students. Please refer to the district memos that were sent out regarding ELL files.

If you need reading and writing picked up, you need to let Fanny and Michelle know ASAP.

Upcoming Dates

Language and Content Objectives

Every Teacher is a Language Teacher

Another great way for all teachers to support students is to write content AND language objectives and read them together every class. They can be written for units, or individual lessons  and are an effective way to utilize the Tier II vocabulary we talked about last week. They also give students a clear idea of the purpose and goal of their learning.

After teachers decide what they are going to teach, they can consider just two questions:

“1. What language will students need to know and use to accomplish this content objectives?

2.  How can I move my students’ English language knowledge forward in this lesson?” (Echevarría, Jana, et al. Making Content Comprehensible for English Learners : The SIOP Model. Boston, Pearson, 2017.)

Teachers can consider academic vocabulary, language skills and functions, language structures or grammar, or language learning strategies.

Then, post it somewhere visible to all students: We will (content objective) by (language objective).

Examples:

We will identify the character’s personality by retelling the actions she takes in the story. 

We will determine characteristics of different igneous and sedimentary rocks by writing comparative sentences.

We will identify specific landforms on a map of Canada by presenting an oral report about one landform and its influence on economic development. 

https://www.shelteredlanguageresources.com/blog/language-objectives

Virtual Teen Chat with Burnaby Public Library

A fun way for students to meet others from around the district. They play games, talk, and learn about resources from the library. Please share with your students.

Reminders

BC TESOL

BC TESOL is going virtual. The keynote is Kate Kinesella who is discussing ways to improve academic language. Registration is here: http://bctesol.ca/conference-2020/

Resource Share

We can’t wait to get our hands on this upcoming book by local author and fellow ELL teacher Hieu Pham-Fraser.  The Little Girl is Hieu’s own story about the importance of names and systemic racism. Books are being planned for before Christmas so add your pledge to this excitement project or ask friends and family to get you a copy: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1822498000/the-little-girl/community

Share it out

Consider sharing this poster with your school at the next staff meeting.  Often, when we talk about academic language, people assume we are describing Tier 3 words, but Tier 2 language are words students need for ALL subjects. Encourage everyone to focus on teaching the Tier 2 vocabulary students will need to be successful at the current unit.  A list of examples of academic words by grade level can be found on the blog here: http://blogs.sd41.bc.ca/ell/files/2017/12/Tier-2-vocab-K-12.pdf

Have a great week!

Last week’s Victories