It is Sunday! My first day of my "new years" resolution to blog at least weekly. Today I went out with some friends to celebrate one of them getting a job as an ESL teacher at a nonprofit in the city. As we talked about life our conversation turned to teaching. I find this is such a natural progression when a bunch of teachers get together! As we spoke of phonics vs. whole language and phoneme grapheme mapping, we realized that all students are the same no matter the age. She will be teaching adults English but the approach is so similar to teaching ESL children. Make it fun! Make it meaningful! Make it stick!!!
I thought back to my experiences this year. I started the year with 15 children out of 21 reading at least 9 months below level. This is almost an entire year! I sat back that first week of school and realized I would have a very different approach this year. I had to try to make up two years of education in one! After I sat back for a bit, I realized that it would be no different that any other year or any other student. I would start with the basics and take one step at a time. When they accomplished a goal we had a dance party! We graphed gains in Fry words and reading levels and celebrated each others' success! By mid year only 9 children were below level and a big part of that accomplishment was my students. They decided to learn and found out that hard work pays off! You can't make someone learn but you can teach them how to love learning.
Anyway, click here for my new TpT items and brief explanations of the items. I love making things and getting creative so if you have a game or item you want but don't want to make it yourself - email me- I will be glad to help. :) Enjoy! Remember ~ every day is an adventure!
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