Week 1.1: Discussion about Teaching Literacy to English Language Learners

Entry #1: Discuss with another teacher, his/her philosophies about teaching literacy to English Language Learners.

I spoke with my colleague, Ms. Kelley about teaching literacy to English Language Learners (ELL). We both teach at Silverthorne Elementary School in Silverthorne, Colorado in the preschool classroom.Half of the students in our classroom are Hispanic.

Ms. Kelley told me that repetition is key to teaching ELL's. She reads the same big book throughout the week. The first day, she will do a picture walk through the story. The second day, she will read the story to students. The third day, she will have students help her read the story. The fourth day, she will read the story again and have students do a fun project to go along with the story. For example, this past week we read the original story of The 3 Little Pigs in class. On the fourth day, students chose to make either pig ears or wolf ears. Then, they reenacted the story out on the playground. The pigs even chose a shelter for the wolves to try to blow their "house" down. 

Ms. Kelley also mentioned the importance of songs and finger plays when teaching literacy to ELL's. While teaching kindergarten, I loved singing songs with my students. During calendar time, we did "The Months of the Year," "Days of the Week," and other calendar songs. Ms. Kelley enjoys doing nursery rhyme songs including, "Five Little Frogs," "Five Little Ducks," and other songs. She uses little toy ducks, frogs, and other animals to reenact the nursery rhyme/song. The students love it and will often times sing along! 

The third element to teaching literacy to ELL's that Ms. Kelley and I discussed was using visuals. When introducing new vocabulary, Ms. Kelley will often show students a picture. She will sometimes use the projector to show a picture or will show a picture that she has already printed off. She will also while reading a story do motions to demonstrate what something means. For example, today the word freezing was used in a story and she said burr... while putting her hands over her chest. Students were quickly able to figure out that freezing is another way of saying cold.