"I am an ESL teacher at a high poverty, high mobility school. As the ESL teacher, I coteach in three classrooms of second and third grade students. About 75 percent of the students in these three classooms come from families who speak another language other than English. They come from 2 Spanish s...
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"I am an ESL teacher at a high poverty, high mobility school. As the ESL teacher, I coteach in three classrooms of second and third grade students. About 75 percent of the students in these three classooms come from families who speak another language other than English. They come from 2 Spanish speaking countries, three West African Countries, and 4 Asian countries. Some of the students have just arrived to our country and have little to no English.
Because our students speak so many languages, it is imperative that we can draw from our joint experiences. We have to create a common language and understanding when we are learning grade level math, science, social studies and language arts. Every student needs to be able to talk to each other, and make their thinking understood and explicit. This is an extremely difficult task sometimes because we have no jumping off point without a camera to document our past learning experiences and discoveries.
With a digital camera we could have taken pictures of each step of our last science experiment. (We germinated fast plants in the light and the dark and compared their growth.) We could have used the cameras to help us learn about the inquiry process and talk about in English each step of the growth process and the life cycle before, during and after the science experiment. These pictures could have supported our English language comprehension, and input/output, by giving us a medium to support our observations, our understanding and our predictions in our writing and orally. We wish we could have used real pictures to create a science journal that students could have dispersed through the school. This is just one example: real photos is the piece that is missing from our units.
Here's your chance to help us buy our camera so that we never again lose an opportunity for students to grow from an authentic language experience like this one! Please help my cute, cute students learn English!
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Emily M. (volunteer)
on Oct 29, 2009
