Preschool for ELLs: Academic Skills

How can preschool programs prepare ELL’s for academic success? Please join me for Part Two of this Colorín Colorado webcast, Preschool for English Language Learners.

Bethanne Patrick: [Music] Hello. I’m Bethanne Patrick. In the previous segment of this webcast, we discussed English language instruction for young English Language Learners, or ELL’s. In this segment, we’ll discuss curriculum and the academic side of the equation. Welcome, Dr. Becky Palacios.

Becky Palacios Thank you.

Bethanne Patrick: Glad you’re here. You’ve talked about preschool being much more than naps and babysitting. What are the components of a good preschool program?

Becky Palacios Well, a great preschool program will have the ability to teach children in a multiple amount of subjects, to cover them all from science to reading to social studies, art, music, health, physical education. All of those components are very important, and as well as looking at their social and emotional well-being and their physical well-being.

Bethanne Patrick: So what should a well-rounded curriculum for young ELL’s include?

Becky Palacios Well, one of the things that we do in our school is develop all those different subject areas into themes, and so when we look at themes and look at learning over time, one of the best ways that we have found is that if things are organized around a central theme, second language learners, English Language Learners, are more likely to understand and comprehend the instruction if it’s very well organized.

Bethanne Patrick: Well what skills do we want those young ELL’s to take with them to kindergarten?

Becky Palacios Well, we definitely want to develop really good pre-reading and reading skills with young children. That’s one of the basic premises of a well rounded curriculum is that everything that you do in your environment, in your teaching, your strategies, is going to include a literacy middle part, a hub, around everything else that you teach.

So, for example, if I’m working with a theme that may be a science, and we’re looking at maybe ocean animals, ocean families, then we’re going to make sure that those book we select, those books that we read, are really going to relay a lot of the fiction and non-fiction parts of learning about animals in their native environment and using a lot of that language because things that are very real to children can then be included. You can take them to an aquarium and they can look at fish in a small school or classroom aquarium. They can look at animals in their context, and the more that they’re immersed in something that’s real, the better they’re going to acquire that language.

Bethanne Patrick: How do we help them, these young ELL’s to develop good social and communication skills?

Becky Palacios Well, we need to have them practice. You need to pair them up in really good peer learning situations. You have an English Language Learner, you pair him off with a strong English language speaker where they can communicate together, and we definitely use all that type of language development that we know is important as, again, they go into kindergarten, we know that we want them to have a lot of phonologic awareness, a lot of understanding of the language, and the teacher’s not the only model. For them to develop a good academic background, they need to practice a language in context.

They need to have good social situations, not just in the classroom, but speakers coming in from the community to help them understand why that language is important out in the real world. Also parents coming in as language models because they’re very important in the classroom to see, “Oh, there’s my mom or my dad or my grandma coming in and sharing experience in their native language. So we want to use language in a multitude of ways, in a multitude of environments with many resources and speakers coming in.

Bethanne Patrick: So what are the pre-reaing skills that we definitely want to have young ELL’s exposed to in preschool?

Becky Palacios Well, definitely phonological awareness, the understanding of how sounds and letters break up into pieces. We need to have children understand what it means to have syllables in words and how they can be segmented and clapped out, for lack of a better type of example, where children can understand that sounds make words and then words make sentences and sentences make paragraphs and then stories. So having them understand how the functions of language work, what those letters are, later on talking about, you know, their sounds and how they correspond to one another, and then leading them to really good print rich environments just to see what’s out in their homes, in their communities and labeling things and using language just in a really rich context.

Bethanne Patrick: Well, speaking of their homes and communities, where does native language fit into reading instruction for a young ELL?

Becky Palacios Well those children that we’ve found out and worked with in our classrooms, those that come in with very strong native language abilities really transfer quickly into that second language learning ability, and the reason I say that is because, for example, we had a child what was just a strong Spanish speaker and was able to pick up on the English language learning because he had to learn basically the words that go with the corresponding concepts that he had already developed. So when you have this conceptual understanding and conceptual awareness of what things are in the world, and you transfer those labels into that second language learning, those children just grow so quickly and develop that for us the English language learning at a much richer level and a much quicker level than children who haven’t been read to or talked to or sung to when they were very young.

Bethanne Patrick: Well, what are some effective ways to assess the ELL’s reading progress throughout the year?

Becky Palacios Well, we look at the different types of ongoing assessments that… can they clap these things? Can they rhyme? Can they find words in context? Can they circle letters? Can they see these things? So as you use interactive white boards, as you use words and pictures labeled together, I play the game where they would cut them up and they have to put them back together. We would use scissors, and we would cut up the word and they would have to, for example, if they have the word “cat,” put it back together in the right order after you’ve cut it up and put it back together. And then you have to label the picture that you labeling or the actual puppet that was there. Using language in context, assessing them in a multitude of ways, and it’s hard for me to give examples because there’s so many of them throughout the year that they progress through.

Bethanne Patrick: Well, I’m going to give you a chance to give a couple more, so I want to know about some of your favorite reading activities and the strategies in the classroom.

Becky Palacios Well there’s many. I think just at the very beginning when I would get a book, I would just read it for fun, just read it for the joy of reading because one of the main things that we have to instill in children is the motivation to read. What is my purpose to read this book? It’s got to be engaging. It’s got to be meaningful to him or her. They have to want to read it, so it wasn’t just about me selecting books, it was about me having the ability to have a showcase of books and let them choose. “I want to read this book. I want to have this book.” And then we would read it for the joy, the fun of reading it, and once we did that, we could come back and then take it apart.

Bethanne Patrick: You have many habits of books in your classroom. Would you tell me about them?

Becky Palacios Well, over the years I have found that I’m just a bookaholic. I love books because it really bridge children and their learning. Whenever there were difficult concepts or concepts that children wanted to learn, there’s always a book that helps to bridge that. And once you use books, you have a common experience. So what I started doing was I started collecting books, and people knew how much I loved books, so I got many gifts as books. Retired teachers would give them to me. Friends would say, “You know what? I just cleaned my kid’s closet out, and I have all these books. Do you want them?” “Yeah. I’ll be right there!” So I had six [inaudible] cabinets full of books. I categorized them by theme because my whole thing was when a child was really motivated to read and they wanted to read a book and they said, “Can we read The Very Hungry Caterpillar?”, I wanted to go put my hands on it right away.

Bethanne Patrick: And do you have those books in both Spanish and English?

Becky Palacios Yes. Yes. And that was a really the beauty of it was that because I was one of the first dual language teachers in our district, a lot of the people that had those books or found those books or however way they would gift them to me, and so, parents in the community who have those types of books who can gift them to teachers, that’s a wonderful resource. Any other teachers that have them that aren’t using them, you know, give them to the person that is really going to use them is really important.

Bethanne Patrick: That’s wonderful. In terms of other content areas, what kinds of concepts should young ELL’s be exposed to in preschool?

Becky Palacios Well, everything. The themes that we were able to write in our school district centered around social studies or science concepts. For example, everything was built around the word “families.” There were ocean families, there were foods families eat, all those themes around the word “families” gave us the ability to teach over time. So using those types of themes to connect learning, to connect literacy, to connect science and social studies, and math to those things that we were doing, then you can sing about them. You can draw about them. You can write about those themes. You have rich content around which to talk about.

Bethanne Patrick: And what about developing those very early math skills?

Becky Palacios Oh, that’s another important piece, of course. Math is very important to the development of children’s learning. National standards, they’ll say that reading and math are the top two things that children need to be successful in, in a good quality preschool program to be able to carry that through into their school career.

Bethanne Patrick: Would you share a favorite math activity?

Becky Palacios Yeah. There were some that we did that were really important when it came to…I’m trying to think of some that were science and math together. For example, we would look at animals and try to classify what those animals were by their coverings, and so that was a very important science concept. But then I have the little manipulatives where we would say, “Ok, here’s a set of animals, and they have different types of coverings. Some are mammals, some are reptiles, some are amphibians, some are birds, some are fish. Let’s look at what these are. Let’s divide them up into sets, and once we were able to divide them up into sets, we could graph in math how many there were per set.

And so, not only were we using a science concept to look at the idea of what those animals have to be able to survive in their environment, after that discussion, we were able to graph it, you know, in a big graph on the interactive white board on how many animals they had counted per set.

Bethanne Patrick: Tell us about your biome activity.

Becky Palacios Well, the biome activities were really great. We studied plants and animals in their natural habitat in the spring, and basically what we did, we looked at animals around the world, and the teachers chose different biomes to study. So some of them were the desert, some of them were the tundra, the rainforest, the arctic and so in the tundra and arctic piece we were able to walk in and you would see white in that classroom. You would see those things that live in the arctic and what that looked like in that area. If you walked into my classroom, I had the savannah, so they were able to identify some of the savannahs that were similar around the world. For example, the ones in Africa or the ones in the plains in the United States, so we wanted to give them a global perspective of language, of it’s not just here that we’re studying this. This is around the world. These things exist in patterns around the world. So when you have things that extend themselves in the classroom where they can relate and study them in a variety of ways, it really helps sustain children’s language learning, especially when they’re second language learners.

Bethanne Patrick: How did you assess what your ELL’s were learning in other core content areas?

Becky Palacios Well, all our assessments that were content assessment pieces were totally integrated in whether or not they could draw these things, whether or not they could classify, which is science and math skills, whether or not they could create words in context, whether it was in their native language or their English language learning. So we were doing that language piece there, whether or not they could count and graph or chart…those were all part of the ongoing assessments that we had for every theme.

Bethanne Patrick: What were some of the strategies that you used to tell the difference between language difficulty and academic difficulty?

Becky Palacios Well, and that’s where in my group, my dual language team was very important because in the assessments that I was able to do that we did at the end of every theme, if the children were doing very, very well, I could see that because it was all basically quantified by a rubric on how the children were doing, so if they and an excellent score, a good score, or a weak score, I was able to pinpoint that weak score over time whether or not it was a language issue or whether or not it was a cognitive learning issue by checking with my English teaching partner because if that child over there in the English was doing very, very well, then it was just the language piece. It was the cognitive piece. So, that teamwork, that planning, if there were issues we would talk to the counselors, so you can always tell as a teacher in that classroom on a day to day basis using your assessments how those children are faring when it comes to learning.

Bethanne Patrick: Well that’s very interesting, and how did you use technology to support instruction?

Becky Palacios Well, technology was awesome because I knew that children were learning in a variety of ways, and, as I alluded to previously, interactive white boards, computers, using those types of things are very important as well as the concrete manipulatives you use every day to make things real and part of your hands-on learning, but using technology is something that these kids are going to be so used to. Now everybody’s little, you know, phones and computer-generated games are all in their hands, and those kids are already used to that. So we want to be able to, as schools, stay up what that type of technology. It’s difficult when you don’t have a lot of funding. So for me, writing grants, looking for donors in the community, bringing those donors in and saying, “Look what you’ve created. Look what you’ve helped sustain in their classroom was very important, too, but using the technology to teach and to take them to the Internet and to be able to teach them the beginning parts of research was very important as I worked with my four year olds.

Bethanne Patrick: I don’t want to overlook play and creativity with young children. Why are these such an important part of the curriculum for ELL’s?

Becky Palacios Well, play is so huge because it gives children the ability to be creative and to be problem solvers and to be able to come up with their own solutions to a variety of things. So, setting up the centers very much with the children was huge. Some of the things I left up all year long, like blocks. Blocks are so important to children to be able to play with, to structure. They can learn about balancing. They can learn about gravity. Pile them up too high, and guess what happens, and, yes, it’s going to come down. And those questions, “Why do you think that happened, why do you think you wouldn’t do that again, or how would you recreate this block structure, how would you make it go higher?” So questions that you ask about the children’s play is a very important part. You just don’t say, “Ok, kids, it’s time to go play, and I’ll see you in 20 minutes.” You know, it’s not part of what it takes to become an effective teacher especially when you’re developing language for English Language Learners. You have to be out there questioning. What else do you need? What else can I help you with? What have you done? Can you explain it to the class? Can you draw what you’ve just created and can you share it with the class? Can we take a picture, write a story and share it with you family? A lot of things that can happen in that play.

Bethanne Patrick: How about music and puppets?

Becky Palacios Oh, I love them! [Laughter] Of course that’s a great way to learn a language because you’re learning it authentically, and so lots of CD’s, a lot of music, a lot of dance, a lot of movement was very important to me and using that with children, and they would request, “Can we sing that again?” “Can we sing that one we sang the other day?” “Can we sing this that we sang, you know, way back when?” And, so, using music every day in a variety of ways is a great way to learn repetition, to learn how to model songs and movement, to be able to find words and pick them out in a story. That’s a whole new basis for literacy.

Bethanne Patrick: Excellent. Let’s take a step back. You’ve worked very hard to promote national preschool standards and universal preschool during your career. What’s inspired your passion in those areas?

Becky Palacios I think just knowing that as a young child, I was very in tune to wanting to go to school. I wanted to go to school, and one of the fallacies back then was that if you knew enough English you didn’t have to go to school. You didn’t have to go and pre-learn your language ability, and they gave me a step, you know, ahead in one to see what a school was. I think they just gave me an incentive. But once I saw what school was, I was just one of those schoolgirls, and I know what we can do when you have positive teachers, positive experiences, but especially for young children because we have a window of time in that learning when everything is so exploratory. Everything’s “Why, but why does that happen?” And everything’s a wonder in those early years when you see those eyes sparkle and they’re magic like: “Why did you do that? Look what happened when you did that!” Important examples of fun activities where children are learning are so crucial.

Let me give you one example. One of them was, we were doing a banana experiment where we knew that there was water in the banana, and one of the creations that my coworker and I did was we rolled that in dry Jell-O, and if you look at the banana after a few seconds, it starts to really get colorful, and it shows you that that mixture of that water that’s in the banana is making that change. And the wonder in kids’ eyes when they see…we call it “rainbow banana”…when they see that rainbow banana come to life was magical. And so that was an impetus for teaching about the rain, the water, the water cycle, and so things like that, that universal preschool programs can do that just give them such a fascination with learning is very important.

Bethanne Patrick: That sounds wonderful. Thank you Becky.

Becky Palacios You’re welcome.

Bethanne Patrick: That wraps up this segment, but there’s still more discussion to come. Please join us for Part Three of this webcast. We’ll discuss professional development and mentoring in ELL preschool programs. You could learn more about early literacy for English Language Learners and watch the other segments of this webcast at www.colorincolorado.org.

Funding for this Colorín Colorado webcast is provided by the American Federation of Teachers. Additional support from the National Council of la Raza.

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