Teaching English Language Learners: SEI

Hi everyone! It is Bex here from Reading and Writing Redhead! This summer, I have been engrossed in studying Sheltered English Immersion. In Massachusetts all non-English speaking students need to be enrolled in mainstream English-speaking classrooms (with a few exceptions). ESL instruction might be done in a pull-out setting but the majority of an ELL student's day is spent in the classroom. The state realized that we teachers needed to learn more about effective strategies to meet the needs of those English Language Learners, so all of us have to either take a  course or pass an SEI exam. Since I have been thinking so much about SEI lately, I realized many of you have English speaking students in your classroom and it might be the right topic for a post!

So if you are new to this, you may need to start at the beginning - what is SEI? In Massachusetts, SEI is Sheltered English Instruction. I know in other states, it stands for Structured English Immersion and has slightly different characteristics, but I will tell you what I know. By no means am I an expert- if you want to know more I will give you some resources at the end but if you want to learn more about teaching ELL students in your own state check resources at your school and your state Department of Education Website. Let us know what you learn and comment below.

The short answer is that every classroom in Massachusetts that has at least one ELL student is a SEI classroom. Each SEI classroom must have a Highly Qualified Teacher of English Language Learners- that means the teacher must be certified in ELL, taken and passed the required state SEI course or taken and passed the state teaching exam for SEI.  Basically, classroom teachers and school staff who interact with ELL students in any way are learning what are the best practices for teaching these students in the English speaking classroom.

I'd love to share with you some of the strategies I learned about being a teacher in an SEI classroom. There was a lot of information I had to learn about levels of English Proficiency and how to assess what level students were and a LOT of information on setting both content and language lessons for every lessons, plus differentiating lessons for students at  different levels of proficiency- too much for one blog post.  Here are a few tips I picked up on.

  

 I had done some reading and taken a course in teaching ELL students last spring, and combined with the materials I studied the summer, I picked up on some vocabulary strategies to try when working with ELL students.  There are a ton of effective strategies and each works best in different situations depending on the word, the content area, the age of the student, and their level of English proficiency.

Word Wheels are great to try. You write the word you are learning in the center and then it is flexible - you can write synonyms, antonyms, word forms, or semantic connections around the outside. Here are a couple examples with detailed directions on Word Wheels: Primary Education Oasis' Blog Post and Widgit.com's preteaching vocabulary brochure pdf.

A word form chart was another suggested strategy for teaching vocabulary to ELL students. I couldn't find a good example of it online but, basically you chart a vocabulary word that has different forms (great for verbs - you can do past tense, present tense, etc) and discuss how the meaning changes and how to use each form. A goal of vocabulary instruction is giving students the tools to unlock word meaning on their own and this is a good way to start!

Focusing on cognates is a solid strategy to use with ELL students. Cognates are words in different languages that are derived from the same original word or root (for example family - familia and conversation and conversacion). There are tons of words in Spanish, for example, that are cognates with words in English.

There are many more great strategies. I will provide links below so you can check more out!

  

There are many writing strategies that will support your ELL student. One that would be useful for students with lower English proficiency is sentence frames. Sentence frames are sentences the teacher writes, then removes one or more word from . A word bank can be provided for students with content specific words, for example. So a student who has limited writing skills in English can complete sentences such as: Plants need, ________, air, and light to grow.  The _______ of the plant take in water from the soil. The ______ of the plant carries the water to the leaves" and so on instead of having to write an open response stating what they know about plants. 

Here are a couple places where you can find more information on sentence frames:

Fairfax County Schools' First Grade Team Post on Sentence Frames

Positive Engagement Project's Sentence Frames Information

For students who are early in their English language development and need a lot of assistance with literacy skills you can try the language experience approach. A student would verbally tell you their story and you write it down, word for word as he tells you. Then you read it back and discuss how the story sounds, if the message was communicated, and so on. Then you and he can edit it a little together. I am not an expert on this one, as I have never tried it myself but you can learn more here:

Professional Learning Board

Literacy Connections

One more strategy that came up a lot as I was reading about teaching ELLs in the SEI classroom was graphic organizers. Graphic organizers have endless possibilities in the classroom anyway, and are so beneficial to ELL students to organize their thoughts and get their ideas written down. There are so many graphic organizers for skills like sequencing, cause and effect, etc. that can be use in writing assignments. Check out these ideas in detail:

Color in Colorado Project

ESL Partyland

BusyTeacher.org

I have even more ideas for strategies on teaching reading to ELL students and assessment but I am going to save them for a future post! For now here are some great resources from around the web if you are interested in learning more. Thanks and please comment below and let us know your thoughts and strategies for meeting the needs of ELL students in your classroom!

Mrs. Dailey's blog post on vocabulary
Color in Colorado
Adventures in TESOL
Sharing Learning- Teaching English with Technology 
Ed.gov Blog
Everything ESL

And a thank you to Ashley Hughes for the beautiful frames and Dollar Photo Club!

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Celebrating Young Authors

We would like to welcome a guest blogger to our Literacy Land today: Maria from Curious Firsties. She is a first grade writing teacher.  That's right!  She teaches four 70 minute blocks of WRITING each day!  Needless to say, she has a passion for our young writers!

Thanks for joining us today, Maria!

Writing is a beautiful thing.  Can we get an amen to that?!  We are so blessed to be able to watch this process unfold in our young firstie writers.  After weeks, I mean WEEEEEKS, of sketching, writing, conferencing, sharing, conferencing some more and then finally choosing a piece to take to publication, our firsties are in need of some type of reward for their efforts. 

So we reward them with a PARTY!  And, who doesn't love a party?  Our firsties LOVE being able to share their work with families, friends, other students, teachers, and even our principal!  We love the look in their eyes when they are reading a piece THEY wrote and illustrated.  We love how empowered they feel as authors. 

Here's the fun part of celebrating authors..... THE CELEBRATIONS!  We have celebrations for just about every author we study in our writing class.  We like to mimic authors such as the GREAT.........  MO.WILLEMS. (in my best Jimmy Fallon voice)

We love keeping our decorations simple and cheap.  :) 

Next up....  Jane O'Connor
 After reading all about Fancy Nancy, we have a celebration to read our "How-To be Fancy/Handsome" to our parents.  Our firsties get all dressed up in ruffles, pearls, and suits.  For those who "forget" because sometimes that happens, we have our own Ooh La La Beauty Spa!  Here we give out mustaches, paint fingernails, tie bows in the girls hair and give the boys bowties!  It has been a BIG hit the last two years!

 Our next big celebration is for all our nature enthusiasts!  This year we added a SAFARI WALK to our research celebration. We think this was a student favorite.  Of course inspired by Pinterest we set up our classroom like this...

 And for this coming school year we have a few more celebrations in the works, but parties will not be on the top of that list. Instead, we will focus on one goal. We will be celebrating author accomplishments daily!  We are great about using our words to tell them how they are doing, but we'd like to take this a step further!  Our newest way to celebrate authors is by giving them bracelets!
Not only will our firsties love them, but our parents will also be informed about what their child is doing well at in writing class. :)  Two birds. One stone. :)

The inspiration for this came from my own girls.  They LOVE, LOVE, LOVE bracelets.  My oldest loves them so much she never takes them off.  She told me, "Mom, it's a part of me." That's when I thought..... hmmmm.... How can we do this in our classroom?  Bracelets.For.EVERYONE! 

These bracelets to encourage your young authors can be wrapped around a wrist,

                                    Put on a backpack,                   or on a lunchbox.
The possibilities are endless.  :)

Here's to an AMAZING year of growing young authors!



Click on the picture for your bracelet FREEBIE!



Maria from Curious Firsties

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Helping Students See Their Progress

Hey everyone! It's Bex here from Reading and Writing Redhead. Another school year has passed and at the end of the year I do a lot of reflecting on how things have gone.

Sometimes I feel like my kiddos don't really understand how much they have progressed and at times I think I forget too. A bunch of years ago I came up with an idea to help! We always do a fairly simple comprehension activity in the fall. Our school uses the Treasures reading program and the first story is David's New Friends. We read the story together and I give out a fairly simple Beginning, Middle, End activity. We discuss together the story and I ask for student suggestions as to what happened in each part of the story. We also talk about what to do if you don't remember, and someone always suggests to go back and look through the story and get ideas from the pictures and text! Then the kiddos go ahead and complete the page without help (which is SO hard to do for me, I am dying to help!!). I collect them and correct them and file them away for parent conferences.( By the way, this year I showed them again to parents at the March conference as we looked at their child's current writing work. It was a great way for them to see growth.)

Then, about a week before school ends, I pass out the old Treasures books from the first half of the year again. The students are usually perplexed - "But we already read those stories!" I have them choose either to read the story again to themselves or with a buddy. I explain we are going to read David's New Friends and complete the SAME assignment they did in the fall and then I will give them the old one so they can compare.

A couple of my fellas rereading David's New Friends.

  

After everyone is done and before we pass back the papers from September I ask how they thought the story was to read- thumbs up for easy, thumbs in the middle for just right, thumbs down for hard. Most give a thumbs up! I  give a reminder that in the fall most of them thought it was just right or hard to read! Then the fun starts!

Here is someone's before and after paper (sorry I should have put the September paper on the left)!

Such an improvement in many areas- handwriting, spelling, sentence length, detail, even comprehension. In the fall she just copied a sentence from the story for each story part. Now she wrote her own response and fairly detailed responses at that!

This is another girl's before (on the left) and after papers. 

It is interesting to see changes like letter size, capital letters not being in the middle of the sentences any more, improved spelling, but also interesting because I think she could be doing better. With her skills she can write longer sentences than the ones on the paper in June. They are really almost the same length as the ones in September. When everyone raised their hands and commented about the comparison, many kids said things like, "Oh my paper in the fall had 4 word sentences and my paper today has a 13 word sentence",  "My sentences were so short in the fall! They are twice as long now" and "I wrote one short sentence in September but 3 sentences for each part today!" I hope by seeing other's pages and hearing how they improved she might be inspired to put a wee bit more effort into her work in the fall.

So in any case, I hope this gives you an idea or two on how to get your students to actually see their progress. A tip I have is be sure to store the September work in a VERY safe place so you don't lose it. Then a kid or 2 will be disappointed because they can't see their own work. I had someone who refused to do it in the fall and I forgot about it until it was time to do this one.

What do you do to help your students see their growth. Comment below and let me know!

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Five Engaging End-of-Year Literacy Activities

Ah, the end of the school year is near.  I have nine more days to be exact, but who's counting? ;)

It can be challenging to keep students motivated, but with a little planning, the last few weeks of school can be meaningful and fun.  Here are some time-honored end-of-year literacy activities you may want to consider.

Balloon Pop Countdown

Mrs. Pehanich's Classroom, Shepherdstown Elementary School.

Build excitement and enthusiasm for the last few days of school. Surprise students with a Balloon Pop Countdown.  Each day a balloon is popped and a special privilege is revealed.  Here are a few of my favorite treats...

• Mystery Reader:  A Guest Will Visit and Read Today
• Read (or Learn) Outside Today
• Write with Markers (Instead of Pencils) All Day
• Lights, Camera, Action:  Readers Theater on the Stage
• Tech Day:  Play Your Favorite Online Literacy Games
• Book Buddies:  Read to Younger Students Today
• Foamy Fun:  Practice Spelling (or Cursive) in Shaving Cream

Memory Books

Activities by Jeanine Enns and The Reading Mama

Looking back can be so much fun, but it’s also a great instructional tool for reviewing the year's learning.  Create your own memory book or download these free templates... 

• Class Memory Book:  Students each prepare a page for a {memory book} that can be added to your classroom library.
• Individual Memory Book:  Students can reflect on their favorite memory, class field trips, and the friendships they've made in their very own keepsake {memory book}.

Craftivities

Craft-activities by Kelly Dolling, Jessica Travis, and Janet Rainey

Who doesn't love a good craft and writing activity?  Use the links below to download a craftivity that will have students reflecting on - and writing about - their school year.  A great keepsake!

• {Memory Makers}:  Students will capture their favorite memory with a cute camera craft.
• {This Year Was Sweet}:  Students will record their sweetest memories with this cupcake booklet.
• {That's a Wrap}:  Students will wrap up their thoughts about the school year on a movie clapper board.

Letter Writing

Activities by Amy Labrasciano, Hope King, Khyrs Bosland

Letter writing provides a valuable opportunity for students to think about themselves as learners, reflect on their school year, and consider their future goals. Click on the links to download free templates.

• Dear Teacher: Students write a {letter} of introduction to their upcoming teacher. 
• This Year Rocked: Students write a {letter} to incoming students. Help make their first day a little less scary. Share helpful information and highlights from the school year. 
• Hello Future Self: Students write {letters} to their future selves. Invite them to write about the things that matter to them - friends, family, school life, and other interests. Ask them to make predictions about their future.

Get Students Ready for Summer

Bookmark by Erin Holleran

Activities by Whitney Parlin and Jen Bradshaw

Get students excited about reading and writing over the summer and help them prevent the "Summer Slide".

• {Summer Reading Bucket List}:  Students visit the school library and complete a list of 10 books they would like to read over the summer.  
• Decorate a Journal:  Students create a summer journal by decorating a composition book with pictures and patterned paper.  
• {ABCs of Summer}:  Students keep track of their summer adventures by completing this alphabet booklet.
• {Summer Fun Jar}:  Students decorate a jar and fill it with fun activities that will build background knowledge and maintain literacy skills.  Each day over the summer, they can pick a slip out of the jar to complete. 

Time to Share!

What are your favorite end-of-year literacy activities?  Please share your ideas with our readers...leave a comment.  :)

*Special thanks to Melonheadz and I'm Lovin' Lit for the graphics used in this post.

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