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

Newsela in the ESL Classroom

As an ESL teacher, I am constantly searching for the latest tools to help my students learn English. There are literally thousands of resources for teachers on the web these days. I spend a fair amount of my planning and free time poking around the Internet looking for the newest, edgiest, highest quality apps and sites to hook my students and boost their language skills. One that I've used for a few years now--and keeps getting better and better--is Newsela. Newsela is a leveled reading program that takes high interest articles from national and regional news sources and presents them across a variety of reading levels. This is particularly important in an ESL classroom in which there are students at varying stages of English language acquisition. As a class, students can read the same article while accessing it at his or her own reading level. Articles are paired with quizzes and writing prompts that are aligned with Common Core standards.

What's more, the talented staff at Newsela provide a wealth of tools for teachers and students, including a Learning & Support section that is brimming over with useful ideas. Most recently, Newsela has added Health and Sports to its sections, providing a wider array of articles that can be used by more teachers across more disciplines. Newsela also provides articles in Spanish, further supporting Spanish-speaking ELL's while giving teachers another method to check for understanding.

With the added bonus of being free, Newsela really is a gem. This semester, my ESL students have a goal of reading two articles per week. I'll post an update on our progress in a few weeks. In the meantime, I encourage readers to visit www.newsela.com and browse around. Enjoy!

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

Here Comes SUMMER!!

There are 12 academic days remaining in the school year at Frontier Regional School. How could that be? It seems like just yesterday we were trudging through knee-deep snow and ice, dealing with temperatures below zero, and seeing nothing but white all around. Magically, June is here--and that means that our long-awaited summer break is right around the corner. As an ESL teacher, my thoughts turn to the "summer slide." No, not the pool slide, or the slip-n-slide, but the regression of reading, writing and other literacy skills that tends to happen when kids are not engaged in academic structure. That's something I work hard to prevent, or at least lessen, as I get ready to send my students off into summer break.

Thankfully, Frontier ESL will continue over the summer in tutoring mode. Each of my students will be scheduled for small group or one-on-one tutoring during the month of July. Awesome! But for those hours outside of tutoring time, and for much of August, we still need to keep our English in tune.

Two online literacy resources that I've used with students throughout the year are Duolingo and Raz-Kids. Duolingo is a great site that allows people to learn a new language anywhere, anytime, and it's free. It incorporates all four language domains (reading, writing, listening and speaking) and it provides individualized instruction. I happen to have my own Duolingo account for learning Spanish. It offers iPad and iPhone compatibility, but it also works great on a desktop computer. Students (as well as their parents and other family members) can use it and even compete with one another to motivate learning. One of my students currently has Duolingo on his smartphone, and he reports that he uses it regularly at home. Based on his steady progress over the past six months, I do not doubt his word.

Raz-Kids, a component of Reading A-Z, offers leveled e-books as well as assessments. Although it's not a free resource, for a yearly $99 fee, Raz-Kids can be added to a Reading A-Z license and used to expand a classroom library. The books available through Raz-Kids are talking books, meaning the text is both read and heard. Audio support is particularly valuable for ESL students as it cements letter-sound connections and improves pronunciation and automaticity. From the teacher's perspective, progress monitoring is made easy both for running records and high frequency word knowledge. Like Duolingo, Raz-Kids is available on iPad and iPhone. I am thrilled that my district offers this valuable literacy resource, and even more pleased at how my students have responded to it.

I plan to stay connected to my students over the summer during those times when we won't be in class together. Duolingo and Raz-Kids will make it easy. If any readers have other suggestions for great technology/literacy sites or apps, please share!

Happy summer,

Mrs. Blair
Frontier ESL Teacher