Terrific Tips from Teachers for Newcomers

Having a Newcomers in class can be so exciting, especially 

when you think of the hurdles the child has been through to arrive 

and the avalanche of new words, concepts and information you'll soon be teaching them. 

To help you out, I've gathered together some tips of proven strategies

that other teachers have tried and found to help you get started.
Just click on the links to take you to the source.

10 Teacher Tips

What a Treasure-Trove this is! A site within a site that will take you too a library of on-line books.

Free ESL on-line Games and Books

It may seem obvious, 

but when trying to reach out to students who don't speak your language 

there are some things that are helpful and others that are useless.

Helpful and Not

Is Your Classroom ELL-friendly?

Laura Candler, blog author, passionate teacher, and creator of the Teaching Resources website has shared this article by Deb Hanson of Crafting Connections. 

Open this link to find easy, attainable tips that are great for all students!

Is Your Classroom ELL Friendly?

A picture's worth a 1,000 words!

This section of the blog is dedicated to giving a boost to Newcomers that just arrived in your classroom.  A host of  ideas are gathered here to help you offer them essential vocabulary to bridge  

their past to their new environment. Let's start with Greetings! 

Help them pair these beautiful photos with vocabulary, add "Good" 

and they're ready to meet new friends.

Atelophobia 

Here are the words!

Parts of the Day Labels

And so we begin with Newcomers!

New-to-the Country students need simple visuals. 

It doesn't get much easier than this!

http://sunflowerstorytime.com/2011/09/23/hello-goodbye/

Creating an MPI (Model Performance Indicator) Strand

Now that you know that an MPI offers a format for writing objectives to help us differentiate within our classroom, we need to practice. A team of teachers from Sullivan has video taped their meeting where they created their first strand of MPIs to meet the needs of all of the different levels of proficiency in a Third Grade classroom. Included in the meeting was the classroom teacher, the PST, the ESL teacher and the Title 1 teacher. Together, they all could offer a different perspective as they brainstormed for various activities that all will meet the same CCSS. We can do the same thing, but to see what that means, you can watch their video by following this path:
Administrative Software
School Shortcuts
DOB Shared Staff Drive
ELL Resources
MPIs
Creating an MPI Strand

Who wants to practice with their next unit of study?

ELL Objectives: (MPI) Model Performance Indicators

All students are learning the same thing, just in a different way. We can take any topic and make it accessible and meaningful to all ELLs by changing the cognitive function and support in our objectives. WIDA Standard 2: ELLs communicate information, ideas and concepts necessary for academic success in the content area of Language Arts (Picture books, Phonemic awareness, Story elements) According to Bloom’s Taxonomy, some variations of verbs can be used to differentiate your objectives. i.e. Understanding: Lower ELL levels: label, name, find, draw, repeat, fill in, match, record, retell, identify Higher ELL levels: memorize, recognize, define, outline, demonstrate, infer, relate, summarize

Bloom's Taxonomy Anchor Chart for us!

This is a great visual for us and a quick "go to" for writing our objectives. Of course the next step towards differentiation is to choose verbs that match the various proficiency levels.

                                                                Source: flickr.com via Amanda on Pinterest