Thing 12: Final Reflection

Thing 35 - Supporting English Language Learners

We have always had a relatively small population of English Language Learners at our school and most of them speak Spanish as their other language. I have a collection of picture books in either just Spanish or both Spanish and English. I also have a couple of Spanish/English dictionaries.


Recently there have been a small additional group of students that have come here due to the hurricanes and flooding in Puerto Rico, so I was interested to find out additional ways to support this group.


One thing I learned from a student right away is that in my attempt to make her feel more at ease, I was showing her books and maps about Puerto Rico, while the class was working on learning about different parts of the world. She didn't seem to be very interested but then when we started to point out states and New York, she was very proud to point to New York and say the word. I realized that she wanted to learn about her new home.




The next thing that arose was that the teachers did not have curriculum materials written in Spanish for the students to follow along with their fellow students. I did get some public library resources to help out but it was hard for the teacher to spend time with the one student with all of the background information etc while still trying to teach the class.




The next issue was that unlike most of the students that grew up in this country, they spoke very little English. One very helpful tool was Google translate. The teacher would type a question in the students IPad and it would be translated in to Spanish.


I read some of the articles in this section and I found some helpful suggestions for the library including: "Using visuals at story time, building background knowledge, making story time interactive (story about animals - students make the animal sounds,) promoting use of the public library" (the one near our school has a large collection of Spanish resources)


One suggestion that I really liked was a source called Teaching Books  https://www.teachingbooks.net/. The Rochester City School District has free access to it, I am not sure about others. Someone had recommended it to me years ago but I did not look at all of the features at the time. With this resource you can search by subject, grade level, and more - see below



You can create resource lists. I made several (see below):



The books have different resources available - see example below for Seeds of Change.