Teaching Tip Tuesday: ELL Students Stuggles

Hi everyone,

As I was reading a professional book, I found some great info about ELL kids. Considering I am an ELL teacher and writing a blog about ELL kids, I thought I would share some ELL tips. Well not so much tips but some insight into what an ELL student would struggle with.

Here are some challenges an ELL student may have in...

*The Language Arts Classroom:
-Idioms and figurative language.
-Pronouns and anecdotes.
-Word order and sentence structure.


*The Math Classroom:
-Possible lack of experience with the standard measuring system.
-May use entirely different algorithms for those customarily used in US classrooms.


*The Science Classroom:
-A huge vocabulary load to lern. Many of which are used differently in the scientific context..
-Many ELL students have no experience with the inquiry method of learning so making predictions may be totally new to them.
-Multiple step directions.
-Students come to the science classroom with naive understanding and misconceptions. (Not just ELL kids.)


*The Social Studies Classroom:
-Little knowledge of the U.S. history, government, and geography.
-Limited skills in determining what is important in text, lectures, and discussions.
-Extrodinary amount of content covered in each lesson.

Hope some of these help you while planning for these kids. 

This information was found in Meeting the Needs of Diverse Learners.

by Paula Rutherford

Now I will leave you with some pictures of my students fancy new watches from...

Phonics Watches, Color Watches, Sight-word watches.

They are just over the moon for them.

 When I told them I was going to take their picture they all stuck their arms in my face.

 Found out yesterday that my iPhone 4s has the panorama feature so next time I'll be taking these panorama style. :)

 They are just so excited it makes me happy.

See you in a couple of days for Thursday Resource. :)