Welcome Back!!

It's a new school year! Yippee!! I love September. Sure, I miss summer, just like any other person, but the time has come for school books, new routines, and fresh opportunities. This year, our ELL population has dramatically increased, which is great! More students, more families, and more healthy connections to facilitate for both newcomers and returning EL's. It seems that now, more than ever, the job of teaching EL's is so vitally important. The political climate is not always exceedingly welcoming or rock solid for immigrants, refugees and other folks looking to learn English. Maybe that's an understatement, but part of my job is simply to make my students and their families feel safe and welcome. That's really the foundation of learning at any level. And so that's what I'm doing on the eve of the first day of school: hosting a Welcome Back Tea for ELL's and their families and advocates. We will have iced tea, snacks, interpreters, and opportunities to ask questions, to be seen and heard.

Good stuff ahead! Can't wait to get Frontier ESL up and running this year!

Best wishes for a GREAT year, all!

Mrs. Blair

Ideas For ELL's

Frontier ESL is always exploring new ways to expand our English language skills, and as an ESL teacher, I find this discovery process to be a lot of fun. Recently, my colleague Ms. Walters brought a fantastic new language learning resource to my attention. The New York Times' Learning Network offers lots of interesting materials for ELL's that focus on worldwide current events (see Frontier ESL post dated March 23, 2015). The Times' latest feature for ELL's incorporates both a video clip as well as a set of pictures, infographics and text to stimulate thinking and conversation around a topic. Click the link to view this dynamic column:

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/author/larry-ferlazzo/?_r=0

In this week's Ideas For ELL's column, students view a short video called "Slow Motion Catastrophe" which highlights the developing issue of drought and wildfires in California. Next, students make observations of a series of pictures, maps and text having to do with the same topic. We discuss what we see, making note of specific observations. Our next step is to focus on academic vocabulary words from the article, using context clues to make inferences about the meanings of new words. Students then articulate how they make their inferences from reading clues in the text to practice reasoning and writing. Lastly, students have the opportunity to submit comments about the video and article online, which is really neat as it takes our little ESL class and connects it to other learners of English around the world. Here are a few comments from yesterday's lesson:

"I am very excited to learn about this. So, thanks, I feel this is very amazing and wonderful to understand."

"I saw a fire once when I was four years old. It smelled smoky. It sounded like "WOOOOO!!" It felt spooky."

"I saw a fire one month ago. It smelled terrible and unhealthy, and it sounded crackly. People evacuated because the fire spreads with intensity to many places."

I could definitely see my students getting engaged in this topic, and the format of the presentation (video, pictures, text) stimulated their curiosity and motivated them to want to learn more. So thank you, NYT Learning Network, for collaborating with ELL experts like Larry Ferlazzo, the author of this column. You're doing wonders for ELL students near and far.

Frontier ESL has a new frontier...

Translate This!

Today's post is a quick one, but the topic delights me. As I was poking around Blogger, the platform I use to publish this blog, I found a neat little gadget that translates blog content into a wide variety of languages. I've popped this gadget onto the right hand side of the blog so that FrontierESL! can be accessible to a much wider audience. My hope is that my students' parents will be able to follow the activity of their child's ESL classroom and have a stronger connection to me and to our school. Yay!! Check it out, and let me know what you think!

Mrs. Blair