Teacher+Resources

Websites

http://www.eslkidstuff.com This website provides lesson plans for beginner ELL students. It has visuals and songs to teach vocabulary and graphic organizers and worksheets for each lesson. You do need to be a members to use this website. http://esl-kids.com/worksheets/worksheets.html This is a free website that helps you create visuals and games for teaching vocabulary to beginner ELL students. There are different categories that you can choose from and the website will provide pictures and will put the pictures into various activities and games. You can also create spelling lists that use visuals. It's really a time saver if you have a themed list! http://www.discoveryeducation.com/ This website can be used by teachers and students. Students can research and create their own board on the site. Teachers can find videos and articles for their students. You can filter everything by grade level to ensure that material is age appropriate. There are also many videos in Spanish. This website does require a membership. http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/story-starters/ This can be used for creative writing with students and can be used for whole class activities and individual writing. The students spin a wheel and are given a silly writing assignment. They can then type and illustrate their story. The students love to write using this method! http://www.teachingquality.org/ You can join this online community to stay current and informed about education. This site is an online global community of teachers. There are blogs and articles about education. You can also find information about classroom practices, Common Core, teacher evaluation, innovative leadership, and school design.

Teacher Made Materials = = This document contains sentence frames for a variety of different paragraphs.

These are math sentence frames for a variety of different math skills. This is an example of a first grade lesson. You can use this template to create lesson plans for ELL students. There are three stages: previewing, focused learning, and application. Each section has both language and content objectives. This is a graphic organizer that you can use when using reciprocal reading. It words well with literature circles or students can work in pairs. This is Marzano's six steps to teaching academic vocabulary. There are graphic organizers that can be used with teaching the vocabulary.

Articles [|Close Reading]  This article by Douglas Fisher explains the close reading strategy in the elementary classroom setting. It gives a clear explanation of the purpose of close reading. Close Reading This is another article that gives and overview of close reading. It explains the strategy and how it relates to the Common Core. [|Using Background Knowledge in Close Reading] This article discusses the use of background knowledge while using close reading. While many argue that supplying background knowledge to any students while using close reading is unnecessary, this author argues that with ELL students it is necessary. [|ELL Parents] This article defends parents of low income and minority students. It brings to light the different values and concludes that all parents care about the education and future of their children. [|Education Spending] This article discusses the negative use of money on standardized state testing. It's eye opening to see how money is spent in education and where it could be spent to make a greater impact on our students.