Merari Weber inspired me to start this blog to periodically write down my thoughts of how I take my students from here to the stars. Her quote was "Belief in student capacity. They can do anything if we scaffold it to their level. :)" I am here to detail that journey of how this is done.
We are now in week 2 of class. Week 1 was distributing the syllabus, going over it even though they could not understand most of it. I showed them this website, I showed them the Facebook group and got 23 of the 32 into my remind group. We had no wifi on week 1 including me. I had a teacher computer hardwired. Even phone services such as Sprint, ATT and Verizon did not work once you entered the building. So I had to get the students to join my remind group from home. I gave them the directions and modeled on the teacher computer and said do it at home. On Thursday we started doing RA. There was a paragraph in their book. I told the students to put their phones away so that they would not use the translator. They were quite upset. I asked them to let me do my job and teach them how to read without the dictionary. I put on the board...I don't understand _________on line _________. We did a bit of pre reading. Then I had them use a highlighter to highlight the words they did not know. Some students said they did not know any words. So I said ok, highlight the paragraph. I modeled how to do that. It took a while for me to walk around modeling for individual students for them to understand that they actually did understand a few words such as student, teacher, I etc... Then we started having them ask me for help. At first no one understood how to use the sentence frame. So I modeled. As soon as they figured it out the room resounded with I don't understand _____on line _____. SUCCESS
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Susan Gaer
A veteran teacher tackling the lowest levels of ESL instruction. Archives
August 2017
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