ESL Chat

I have recently discovered that I love working with students who are learning English as a second language.  It is such a challenge!  My brain is constantly working on how to best communicate with my ESL friends and also how to help them learn.

Actually I minored in Spanish, but they always say if you don't use it, you lose it.  "They" are right, unfortunately.  My Spanish is pretty rusty and I'm certain that everything I say is in present tense among other terrible mistakes.  Many of my friends are so helpful and I find collaboration so valuable with ESL students.  

And, when teamwork or my simple knowledge of Spanish fails, we rely on the Google Translate app.  It is free and so handy!  It took a week or two until I discovered that you can scan and translate.  This has been so helpful!

I did have an embarrassing moment this week when communication broke down, though.  We were reading a passage where a boy got nuts on his ice cream.  I did accidentally read out loud an inappropriate word in Spanish!  A language barrier can be difficult to navigate sometimes!

 As always, a sense of humor is a must in the classroom.  I'm so glad to have this experience and I love seeing how kind and welcoming my students have been.  It has been a new experience for us all.

We can do it!

This week was our first round of ISTEP testing in third grade.  I'll be honest, this is a rough time of year.  Winter seems never ending in Indiana.  You know it has been cold when anything above 20 degrees feels like a heat wave.  There has been a nasty stomach bug going around.  Lots of students and staff have been out multiple days, including me because my own kiddos had it.  The stretch between Christmas and spring break is always a tough one.  A lot of learning happens, but we are all just looking forward to spring and some warmer weather.

We took round one of our testing this week.  The paper/pencil constructed response portion of the ISTEP is given in our classrooms.  Because of this we must cover any educational posters or information that students could potentially use to help them with the test.  So all anchor charts, posters, name tags, multiplication charts, number lines, etc. must be covered or taken down.  We pull out the yuckiest chart paper (don't want to waste the good stuff) we can find and staple it up to cover our beautiful, helpful walls.  Something about this depresses me.  I don't want to cover or tear down all of our learning.  We build those bulletin boards together all year and it is a colorful snapshot of all we have accomplished.

To help us stay positive, we talked about our goals for the year and made a bulletin board (since we had to cover it anyways) to keep us motivated.  Our slogan for this testing season is "We can do it!".  Our big goal for the year is to master the Indiana standards and pass our IREAD and ISTEP tests and I ask the students to set a couple of personal goals.  Some of them choose funny or silly goals, like eating a sandwich in one minute or beating a video game.  Many of them chose awesome goals like improving their grades or becoming a better person.

We spent some time reading about Rosie the riveter.  Then we took photos and drew pictures to help inspire us even more to do our best.  I have awesome students.  We can do it!

Testing Time and ESL

It is a dreaded time of year in third grade (and maybe just generally for everyone).  February-April is testing season in Indiana and third graders actually get the worst of it.  Indiana requires third grade students to take ISTEP (2 times) and I READ.  We are all feeling especially stressed this year with our new Indiana standards, and a new test that is supposed to be hours and hours longer and tougher than ever before.  The test is actually so long that our governor is working on shortening it at the last minute.  Add to that a couple of snow closings and a handful of delays for sub-zero temperatures.

It is a perfect storm of stress.  When I'm stressed I drink too much diet coke and eat too much junk food (all the valentine's candy is long gone so I had to spring for some Easter candy early). And I sort of feel like my creativity is zapped.  Well, nothing will jump start your creativity like getting a new student who doesn't speak English a week before the big test.  I scrambled around today (my new friend arrived without warning) to find some activities for ESL students.  Our school has a subscription to Brainpop.com and thankfully they have an ESL section of their website.  Students can watch videos, practice their English, and take short quizzes on the app.

I also quickly downloaded a couple of free apps suggested for ESL students.  One is called Action Words and it helps build vocabulary for kiddos.  Another is called Fun English.   It looks great and comes with 2 free lessons and 14 games but you have to purchase all the additional lessons individually.  The free content is super fun and useful, though.  A Kid's Academy app, I downloaded looks like it will be basic practice connecting letter sounds with words while giving verbal and picture clues.  

I also read a short article from Edutopia today.  I love it when I read an article and it reinforces everything I've been doing!  I pulled out some old posters and hung them in the classroom to help my new student, but also to encourage my other students to learn and connect with a foreign language.  We will learn and communicate together as best we can.  Nos gusta aprender.