ELL students learn new words everyday, and it’s essential that they have a deep understanding of what those words mean. Without comprehension, new words are useless. The key to helping ELL students succeed is to give them explicit instruction in the academic language of the content they are learning in class. This article offers some strategies and resources for getting started!
Getting information from a nonfiction text can be especially challenging for ELLs, who may not have had much experience working independently with expository texts. This article offers ways that teachers can help ELLs work effectively with nonfiction texts and includes strategies for introducing components, structure, and purpose of expository texts.
Inferential thinking is a key comprehension skill that develops over time through explicit teaching and lots of practice. Find strategies for teaching inferencing, watch a demonstration, and observe a classroom lesson in action.
Are your Spidey senses tingling? In this case, it’s nothing to fear but rather to cheer! Though Daka Hermon is the author of middle grade horror titles Hide and Seeker and Nightmare King, she’s here with ideas to get kids thinking about all the amazing insect qualities of their favorite superheroes — something that as a writer for Marvel’s Spidey and His Amazing Friends on Disney Junior and the author of National Geographic Readers: Marvel’s Spider-Man Bugs Out!, she knows a lot about.
Teachers often find it difficult to integrate writing and mathematics while honoring the integrity of both disciplines. In this article, the authors present two levels of integration that teachers may use as a starting point. The first level, writing without revision, can be worked into mathematics instruction quickly and readily. The second level, writing with revision, may take more time but enables teachers to connect the writing process more fully with mathematics instruction. Six examples are provided, including student work, in which teachers have successfully attended to the goals of both writing and mathematics.
This study of first and second graders looked at teacher-led read alouds as a way to introduce science concepts. Results suggest that multiple exposures to a related concept across different stories gave students more time to build a mental representation of important ideas. This evidence suggests that moving beyond a single text as a source for building students’ understanding is an important instructional approach.
Learn about strategies and ed-tech tools that can help students to reflect on what they did over the summer and then design introductory projects that connect their experiences to the school-year curriculum.
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) learning includes efforts to get kids involved in computer programming. Coding builds logical thinking and problem-solving skills. It’s also creative and collaborative! Find out how you can introduce your child to the basic concepts of programming.
The Knowledge Matters Campaign is an advocacy initiative focused on the critical role of knowledge-building in reading comprehension and critical thinking, with the belief that introducing all young children to rich disciplinary content and vocabulary levels the playing field for learning. The campaign highlights English language arts (ELA) curricula that are carefully designed to build background knowledge in science, history, literature, and the arts, alongside sound foundational skills instruction.
