I am an English Language teacher in a diverse school in Portland, Maine. About 80% of our students qualify for free or reduced price lunch, and 22 languages are spoken among our students. Many of my students have had interrupted schooling due to violence and threats in their home countries. Their families fled to the United States to give them safety, and their parents are grateful for the great public schooling we provide in our country.
My students work incredibly hard to learn English, to learn about the expectations of American schools, and to try to catch up to their classmates in reading, writing and math.
I believe they can do this as long as they have the resources and encouragement they need.
My Project
Most first and second grade students love to read chapter books, and there are lots of book series that are geared for them to read. I struggle to find series that are at my students' reading levels because the English Language learner students that I work with are reading at a lower level than their classmates.
This year I started having my groups read a few of the Elephant and Piggie books by Mo Willems.
Wow! They got so engaged by the humor and the pictures in his books that they begged me to find them all. I ended up going to local library branches trying to find the whole series. For me, it was thrilling to see the kids have that burst of excitement that you get when you find a great series and you can't wait to read the next book. They also grew as readers because they were reading so voraciously.
Fly Guy and Katie Woo are great early reader series as well, and they appeal to a wide variety of children. The Katie Woo series is one of the few series that feature characters of color, too.
My goal is to develop a collection of these three series to have at my school and to use with my students year after year. I look forward to giving them the opportunity to feel the same excitement as their peers and to give them the resources that will motivate their reading and language growth!
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