A Teacher's Philosophy for Approaching Literacy to English Language Learners

I sat down with my sister, who is attaining her Master's degree in Instructional Technology and taught Voluntary Prekindergarten and First Grade, to discuss her philosophy and experiences with her approach to reaching English Language Learners. She said that she endeavors to reach each child at their level using manipulatives, pictures, and cultural stories in their native language. She asks them to share background knowledge of their experiences. The goal is to include students as leaders of activities that are designed in their first language, so they can be confident while sharing with their classmates. The teacher tries to ensure the classroom is not a negative space and approaches her students with a positive and open attitude.  She puts herself in the students’ shoes to try to understand the obstacles they are overcoming. The teacher tries to give her ELL students usable strategies that are easy to remember.

Some ELL students were transfer students during the middle of the year, which also made the students feel like the odd children out. The teacher introduced several lessons to make the ELL students more comfortable by reading books that were bilingual or primarily written in Spanish. An example of this is Skippyjon Jones: Cirque De Ole by Judy Schachner, which includes a Spanish only version CD. When English speaking students listened to the Spanish version of unfamiliar picture books, they had to be detectives like their ELL classmates to discover what was happening in the story. They used repetitive words and pictures to try and gain meaning.  This also forced students to see what ELL students do every day to sort out new information in class. http://www.skippyjonjones.com/

When teaching writing, she brainstorms terms to use with the students and helps to format the sentences. She provides sample sentences to demonstrate the typical order of words. Some manipulatives used in her classroom include magnetic words and sentences to use in small group activities. She has sentence flip books, which have sight words and high frequency words formatted in the order a sentence would be written for students to learn pattern and structure.