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Parents Should Be Involved!

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Becoming Literate in a Second Language: Connecting Home, Community, and School Literacy Practices This reading for this week really focuses on how we can connect literacy practices from home into the school and vise versa. It goes into examples of many different children using literacy practices at home. One that stood out to me was the example about Nan. Even though Nan's parents weren't literate in any language they were still involved in her school work by finding other ways such as drawing to make up for it. It goes on to talk about how children start out developing their families literacy practices but eventually venture off into their own literacy practices. My first question would have to be: What literacy practices do you see your children doing at home? If you don't have children, then what literacy practices do you see your students use in the classroom that aren't what you normally do at school?  How involved do you think your parents are in your class...
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Casey Ward Assessing English Language Learner's Content Knowledge in Middle School Classrooms -Pappamihiel & Mihai          For this week's Blog Post I have decided to switch it up a bit and do a question/response scenario. I will be taking the five main questions for teachers that are "seeking to make their classroom tests and quizzes more valid" (Pappamihiel & Mihai, 2006) for ELL students. These questions are: Do I know my students' English language proficiencies? Have I designed a test that mirrors classroom objectives, strategies, and activities? Have I made use of all relevant and available visuals and graphics? Have I incorporated true accommodations to level the playing field for my ELLs? Have I created a clear scoring rubric that will allow me to provide culturally sensitive and useful feedback? Before I go into answering these questions I would like you to take a look at what an ELL assessment classroom looks like. This v...
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Whew Chile....These Assessments

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Imagine this.....you've just turned 5 years old and your mother excitedly tells you, "You get to go to school now!" You're so excited to go somewhere where you'll learn why the sky is blue and learn bigger numbers than 10...if that's even possible. Your mom takes you along to a thing called Meet the Teacher Night and you're so excited to meet the person who will teach you everything you could ever possibly want to know. You get there and are just bumbling in your seat ready to explode at any minute....the teacher walks in and says, "Are you guys ready to embark on this wonderful journey of taking approximately 112 mandatory standardized tests up until the day you graduate?!?!?!" Now you didn't really understand anything else this lady said, but you definitely heard her say 112.... you think Wow that sounds like a-lot. While your mother thinks huh???? Why so many?  What would you guys think if you were told that on the first day? ...
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In Honor of Women's History Month

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           Wear this dress, act like a lady, pink is a girl color, play with your dolls.                         Blue is a boy color, boys like trucks, cars, and sport. Some common phrases I am sure majority of us heard throughout our childhood. A great way to start teaching social, cultural roles and behavior of gender *sarcasm*. However, we know the older children get gender attitude and behaviors become more intense and new gender roles appear. Inequality becomes even more visible. And it tremendously affects girls.  It is not so much about what toys girls can play with anymore.We know women deal with problems such as the unequal pay in the work force, lack of women in leaderships, discrimination in education settings, violence and human trafficking. If we want change then we have to stop continuing the myth of gender roles. And that means helping women and also men...
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Education and Technology

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EDUCATION IS CHANGING: THE INTERNET DOES NOT LIE The irony of having to incorporate technology into my blog is not lost on me, considering my 11-year-old must help me with computer work more often than I’d like to admit.   There aren’t going to be any mind-blowing stories on how technology has helped me personally, but I will try to communicate how the ways Garcia and Kleifgen ideas on technology effectively help emergent bilinguals throughout their educational journey. The digital era we live in is changing the way students learn, and classroom technologies will continue to change and be more innovative as time continues. Since the 1990’s scholars have recognized the possibilities of enhancing learning through the use of technology, by using different modes of communication such as sound, image, and video (Garcia &Kleifgen), in conjunction with the more traditional written and spoken modes. This was discussed in The New London Group...
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Sheltered Instruction: How Do I Teach This?

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If you haven't seen it for yourself then you have probably heard about teachers giving up on their students due to a language barrier. For example, let's say there was a student name Claire. Claire just moved to the United States and was placed in Ms. Morgan's first grade class. Ms. Morgan was a great teacher and Claire was a great student but Ms. Morgan only spoke English and Claire only spoke Spanish. One day, Ms. Morgan was reading a picture book to the class about a little boy and his pet dog  who loved to play outside together. Ms. Morgan pointed to the picture of the boy playing with his dog and asked Claire what was going on. Claire knew what a boy was, she knew what a dog was, and she knew they were outside but she didn't know the English words to tell the teacher this. Ms. Morgan waited on Claire to answer but after a minute of silence from Claire, Ms. Morgan got frustrated and gave up on Claire and asked another student. This resulted in Claire believing Ms....
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