Teaching Tip Tuesday: Visual Directions

Back for another addition of...

This week I am here to share a wonderful tip several of you already know about. Picture icons!

For several years I struggled with this objective on the ELL rubric/exam...
-Student can read and follow directions.
I always thought they have to read the sentence that tells them what to do on a particular assignment. Sooo, umm, if you don't know I teach K and 1 ELL kids. Several of which are straight from the jungle in Burma. Many of them have trouble still writing their names at the end of the year. This is a big thing for them to be able to do. Now I don't want to give you the wrong impression. My kids eventually can read and perform at grade-level or above but it takes some time.

Let's set my struggles aside, because I really want to share these picture icons. You can use these picture directions with not only K and 1 kids but students of all grades who struggle to read. Actually, it is helpful to ALL students. Like I was saying I thought it meant the students had to read the WORDS, but another teacher clued me in, a few years ago, that reading picture cards was totally ok.

A few years ago several of these "Visual Materials Cards" popped up. I just love them. I first saw them on Hadar's blog, Miss. Kindergarten Love,back when she was Outfitted and Inspired. You can read about them here and here.

 This one is actually Angelica, from Extra Special Teaching, creations.

They are all freebies.

What I love best is that all I do is put up the cards on the board and my kids can just look up real quick to see what comes next. For my older kids I am adding the word next to the picture so that they can associate the two and hopefully build that text language. (Is text-language even a word?)

I even bought this wonderful sight word book this summer for my kinder kids that ALSO has the picture directions included.

 That is all for Teacher Tip Tuesday. I want to share some resources with you tomorrow. Let's see if I actually get to do it.
Hope this helps!