Practicum Project Sharing

What a wonderful experience that I had at Hillcrest Elementary School! I had the opportunity to work with the lowest guided reading group in my first grade class. Three of the four students were ELLs. During my lessons I realized that one of the students was not able to understand some of the stories because of the language barrier. So I began to informaly observe this child more often and realized that she had appropriate BICS or social vocabulary which we learned would come first with ELLs. But what she really struggled with was more the academic language CALPS. So during my mini lessons I was more careful to provide the scaffolding to help this student. We would do little lessons on the mearning and importance of words in the books that we were reading. I also tried to provide opportunities for the ELL students to collaborate with other students. I loved watching this wonderful event take place. The students were really able to help one another learn about the different stories we were reading and inturn practice both BICs and CALPs. Many of the learners in the classroom needed accomodations such as this collaboration. I felt that assessment was a key to knowing what to teach next especially with the students that were not as comfortable with the english language. Both informal and formal assessments were used to help me know where teh students were and how to readjust my teaching to better accomodate their learning styles.