Question:
This week two new students entered my 2/3 grade
classroom, both of whom speak Spanish. Neither student
speaks any English, and the limited amount of Spanish
that I know is not at all useful. I am lucky enough to
have two students in my classroom who are fluent in
English and Spanish, and my cooperating teacher speaks
Spanish as well. These students and my cooperating
teacher have been essential in helping integrate these
two students into our classroom.
I am wondering how other teachers have integrated
students who do not speak English into their
classrooms. The ESL program at our school is a pullout
program, and students are usually out of the classroom
for about 45 minutes during our morning literacy
instruction. Since we use integrated units in our
classroom, the students that leave the room sometimes
miss key ideas that are used in other subjects areas
throughout the day.
Ideally, the ESL teacher would be able to provide
services within our classroom, but I realize that this
is impossible due to the number of ESL students at our
school and the lack of funding to hire more staff.
I would like to hear about effective programs in other
schools as well as strategies for helping ESL students
in the classroom. Any ideas would be appreciated!!
Answer:
I have had several new hispanic students enter my classroom since
school started. (On the average 1 a month). In all four cases, they
are non english speakers.
I recalled some HS spanish, got help from the interpreter and bought a
phrase book. I learned some simple phrases that I said in both
english and spanish. This helped the child feel more comfortable.
My students go to ESL for one 45 minute period and one 30 minutes
period each day. They worrk on speaking, colors, alphabet, sentences,
spelling, vocabulary and reading. My ESL teacher and I work very
closely together to help one another.
The first few days, I would have a different student take the new
student for a walk around the building and point and say the word.
This would be a 5 minute excursion each time.
I would have other ESL students read to the new student and finger
scroll to help with word identification. ALso, they would talk about
the pictures.
We do a lot of alphabet, color by number and dot-to-dot activities.
Ususally, within 3 weeks I am speaking totally in English and they are
answering math computation questions (as we've masterd numbers) and
some English structure things. (Capitalization, nouns, etc.)
It is a joy to see these children progress - validates for me that we
educators are great people!!
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