sandr062

“What if you found that creative genius does not lie in knowing all of the answers?”   That’s how a relatively boring flight to visit family became an adventure in revamping some of my favorite lessons.  As I rapidly approach the beginning of the school year (for the 40 th time), I am starting to think of lessons, activities, and how to motivate my students for yet another year. When I started teaching, I felt that my main purpose was to provide my students with the correct answers to their questions.  The problem turned out to be what whatever was the correct answer to the question one day could very well be the wrong answer the next day.  I also became troubled by the idea that I was producing clones of myself as my students adopted my “interpretations” of literature, events, and life, in general.  I then started to think about the power of questions – but not just any questions – the ones that matter and to which we don’t have the answers. About the time I s...

Summer always seems to bring not only a time of reflection but a time of "spring cleaning" and preparing for the new school year. For me personally, it is also a time of packing and moving this particular summer...As I have been sorting and resorting, I decided it was time to add some resources to our blog in order to round out our "collections" for teachers. That being said, I am distracted from our postings on the Common Core, but will be back commenting in future posts. So...some recent additions to the blog include www.wordsift.com  under Picture File Cards. Cut and paste a passage and it will lift vocabulary and find sources for images. Great for making chants and poems more comprehensible. Tag Galaxy www.taggalaxy.de/ finds images for you when you type in key words, and don't forget both National Geographic www.nationalgeographic.com and National Geographic for Kids Photo Gallery kids.nationalgeographic/kids/photos/gallery/. Two other recent picture file c...

One of the reasons my partner and I started this blog several years ago was to provide resources for teachers that we were training in EL strategies, especially since nothing was "out there" for our particular audience at the time. Since then, we developed our website (which is a continuing work in progress) which also lists resources for teachers. Teachers find our sites incredibly helpful, especially when we are doing follow up and/or coaching. I was recently reminded of the importance of mentioning authors of resources and links by Larry Ferlazzo, an ESL teacher based in the Sacramento, CA area who posts constantly about what is working or not working in his ESL classroom. He has some of the best sites for ELs listed on his blog site and tweets resources 30-40 times a day, believe it or not! Well, I have yet to get there. :) Here is the title of one of his "bests" lists - The Best Resources For Learning About Common Core Standards and English Language Learners. T...

One school year has ended and the next is (hopefully after a time of rest) soon to begin. Summer is a good time to reflect upon what worked in my classes and what did not. What will I keep? What will I change? What will I eliminate? What would I like to tweak or try? Reflective practice... is the habitual and judicious use of communication, knowledge, technical skills, reasoning, emotions, values and reflection in daily practice for the benefit of the individuals and communities being served. (Epstein and Hundert, 2002)  Introduced in 1987 by Donald Schon, the concept of reflective practice is a way for beginning teachers to match their own practices to those of successful practitioners and for experienced educators to reflect on the effectiveness of their lessons and to be aware of the need to change practices and/or direction as their student population changes. As the concept grew in popularity, many schools, colleges, and departments of education began designing teacher educati...

We've added a new game site to our resources listed on the right-hand side of our blog. This site is a great source for creating board games with your students. Enjoy!

Hi Everyone! We have a new category of links posted on our blog on the right-hand side....ESL games. Take a look and let us know your favorites.