One of the most beneficial things we can do for our English Learners is to let them SPEAK! Providing students multiple opportunities affords them the time to practice using the vocabulary that has been taught and to listen to how the language should sound. Flipgrid is an easy to use tool that students can use to record themselves. A teacher creates a grid and poses a prompt for students. Students join the grid and click the + symbol to record themselves using the camera from a computer or mobile device. Students are able to rerecord until they are satisfied with the response. Their is a Flipgrid app that can be downloaded onto mobile device and it also is web based. The web based option does not require anything to be downloaded. What a powerful tool!
Check out this video that I found on YouTube that let's you see Flipgrid from the students perspective: Check out this screencast that I recorded that show you how to set up a class grid:
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When students start reading a piece of text they immediately want to take action. If it is a mathematics word problem, most students want to start doing some calculation with the numbers in the problem. If it is a a story in the language arts classroom, a lot of students start making connections to their own lives and books they have previously read. A great low preparation strategy to support our English Learns across all content ares is Scan the Text. Scan the Text is a strategy that takes place BEFORE students read the text. Students put their finger on the last word of the piece of text and they they move their finger back and up to the start of piece of text. As they are tracking with their finger they are reading each word and listing the words that are unfamiliar or unknown. Once they have their list of words, students take a moment to take another look at those words and figure out how to read them. They can read the words and think back to where they might have seen the word before this occasion or look on a class word wall. They can analyze the words to see if maybe they are cognates. If the words are proper nouns, they can change it to another proper noun that is easier to read or just use the initial. After they have spent time getting familiar with the words they listed, THEN they can start reading the text to make meaning. Why go backwards? If students scan the text from top to bottom, they are most likely to start trying to make meaning and get frustrated when they encounter unfamiliar words. Scan the Text, gives students the opportunity to come up with a game plan for unfamiliar words and that will allow them read with more ease.
There are three tiers of vocabulary. Tier 1 is "every day'' words. Tier 2 is cross curricular vocabulary. Tier 3 is content specific vocabulary. Tier 1 vocabulary is the least specialized type of vocabulary & therefore it is the one that gets the least attention. Most of the vocabulary that our students will encounter and use during their lifetime, yet they will receive limited or no Tier 1 vocabulary instruction. I think back to my own experience, and it was Tier 1 vocabulary that always made me feel the most self-conscious about speaking because I was not sure what those "easy" words were in English. For me, home was in Spanish and school was in English. That means in my mind anything that had to do with household chores, family, and church was in Spanish. There was a time that I had to stop mid sentence because I did not know how to say sarten (a pan). I am a biliterate educator, but my Tier 1 vocabulary in both English & Spanish has a few gaps because I still tend to use one language more than another when I am at home and when I am at work. How much have students developed their Tier 1 vocabulary in both English & Spanish? What are we doing at our campuses to teach our students the multiple ways to describe "every day" objects & events? Having a strong Tier 1 vocabulary can help our students understand idioms, sayings, colloquialisms, and implied meanings during all conversations.
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