Empowering English Learners for Academic Success - CTA Summer Institute at UCLA

  All students deserve equal access to content, regardless of language level or ability. As educators, we need to design lessons that will meet the needs of our students but also cover the standards. I have found that prioritizing the CCSS at the beginning of the year and mapping them out helps structure my lessons. I then go back into my map and align the English Language Development standards and goals.

My goals this year is to:

1. To empower ELL students and their families to be active and successful members within our school and the community.

2. To collaborate effectively with grade level teachers to ensure that ELL students and their families receive equitable opportunities and resources.

3. To promote cultural awareness and to cultivate an appreciation of diversity.

Today’s presentation will also focus on some of my strategies that I use in my classroom to provide my students with meaningful ways to engage with their classmates. They are also strategies to give them ample opportunities to practice language throughout the day.

Click here to access today's slides

Websites to Support English-language Learners

• English Grammar Word Builder offers printable lesson plans, grammar rules, and online exercises.
• Google Translate is a free text-to-speech translator.
• 365 ESL Short Stories are texts for intermediate ESL/EFL students.
• PinkMonkey offers free G-rated literature study guides, with notes and chapter summaries.
• Casa Notes provides note templates for field trip permissions, student contracts, invitation to parent-teacher conferences, etc. Users are given the option of printing the notes in Spanish or English.
• Bitesize Literacy: Great activities and games related to basic literacy.

Online Articles Discussing How to Support ELLs

• Free Apps to Support Vocabulary Acquisition by Monica Burns: Burns always comes up with a creative mix of tools. In this Edutopia piece, she discusses apps like Kids' Vocab by MindSnacks, Futaba, and Flashcardlet.
• Do's & Don'ts for Teaching English-Language Learners by Larry Ferlazzo: In this Edutopia piece, Ferlazzo covers wait time, modeling, non-linguistic cues, and more.
• 50 Incredibly Useful Links for Learning & Teaching the English Language by TeachThought: This curated blog post contains a great collection of resource tools, printables, and other materials for ELL educators.
• Judie Haynes' Seven Strategies for Classroom Teachers of ELLs: Haynes concisely describes comprehensible input, visual lessons, and making testing and homework modifications.
• 10 Ways to Support English Language Learning With The New York Times by Holly Epstein Ojalvo: This piece from The Learning Network recommends creative approaches to using one of the best newspapers in the world with ELLs. 

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Common Core K-5