P-A-R-T-Y! Party! Party! Party! Where is the party? The party’s over here! Does this chant ring a bell? It does for me. It’s a popular chant at every Student Council event. The kids chant it back and forth across the
Read More“ELL” Doesn’t Say it All
Did you know that the majority of English learners in U.S. K-12 schools are not immigrants? From outside of the ELD classroom, it’s easy to see the group as rather monolithic in their needs, despite their cultural and linguistic diversity.
Read More“The Dream Catcher” or The Girl Who Championed Self Doubt
I’m not sure if she was solving multiplication problems with the Checkerboard or working in Read Naturally when I called her over. I noticed she took a deep breath and had that faraway look in her eyes, but she shook
Read MoreOrganized Chaos aka The Prepared Environment
Am I ready? Before students enter the class from the first day of school to the last, it is the goal of most teachers to have the classroom ready and prepared to receive them. In addition to being functional,
Read MoreThe Slippery Slope of Teacher Certification
I swore I would never teach junior high. Junior high, two swirling years of what, as a student, I experienced as daily hell. I owe all my patient and forgiving junior high teachers a debt of gratitude. By the time
Read MoreWhen Executive Orders Get Personal
Yesterday as I drove home from work. NPR reported on the new executive orders expanding the groups prioritized for immigration enforcement– in effect, increasing the number of deportations of undocumented immigrants. But I didn’t hear much of the story. After
Read MoreReality Check for English Language Learners
Snippets of surreptitious conversational Spanish dart around the classroom amid scattered outbursts of giggles. I review the color-coded highlighting of sentence parts in our newest sentence formula involving superlative adjectives, pointing to the laminated neon cards magneted to the
Read MoreBack to la Escuela #3: Spanish for English?
In my previous two “back to schools” blogs, I focused on bringing back librarians and basic supplies such as tissue. I struggled more for the third topic, because the obvious choice seemed to be to bring back teachers! Recently the
Read MoreTeaching to the Test (or Not)
I know I have written about this topic before, the relationship between standards and standardization, instructional innovation and teaching for creativity, and standardized tests, but I am going to take another go at it, because this year I changed levels
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