Supporting SPED & ELL Students
Need more resources and help supporting your students who receive special education (SPED) services, or are English Language Learners (ELL)?
As of late, I have been exploring and asking many colleagues many questions about supporting EL students in class. I recently had the pleasure of attending a district training where teachers from elementary, middle, and high school were able to learn about some basic supports and then had the opportunity to work through their own questions collaboratively. During this time, much of what we learned and discussed was best practices for ALL students, not just SPED and ELL. There were three areas of focus which included providing support through:
A couple of the things that I had not previously considered that I wanted to share with you include the use of Google. Consider trying out some of the following in order to provide supports in the categories above:
As of late, I have been exploring and asking many colleagues many questions about supporting EL students in class. I recently had the pleasure of attending a district training where teachers from elementary, middle, and high school were able to learn about some basic supports and then had the opportunity to work through their own questions collaboratively. During this time, much of what we learned and discussed was best practices for ALL students, not just SPED and ELL. There were three areas of focus which included providing support through:
- Visuals
- Group Work
- Academic Scaffolding
A couple of the things that I had not previously considered that I wanted to share with you include the use of Google. Consider trying out some of the following in order to provide supports in the categories above:
- Academic Scaffolding: Use Google Translate to translate your documents into the native languages of your students, or vice versa. You can allow your students to write in their native language and you or an ELL teacher can use this to translate it to English. You can also translate phrases, websites or entire documents!
- Visuals & Academic Scaffolding: Use Google Images to provide clipart and other basic images to help students make meaning of culturally unique vocabulary (like Animal Pen), or high depth of knowledge words (like Analyze). You can also use images to help support the introduction and pre-teaching of content-specific vocabulary.
- Academic Scaffolding: Last but not least, use the good ol google search engine to search "Sentence Frames for ELL" or "Sentence Frames" and you will find an endless supply of examples that you can use to help support you and your students in their writing.