What do we do in ELL?
As ELL teachers we have the opportunity to observe the daily teaching of our General Education colleagues every day as we are picking up and dropping off our ELL students. However our colleagues do not have the same opportunity to observe us ELL teachers in action, so it is easy to wonder what do we do in ELL? We do welcome our colleagues to drop in and say Hi or just to observe while we are teaching. It only takes a minute or two to walk in or walk by and see what is going on.
This past year our ELL Coaches worked on updating our ELL Checklists. The wonderful addition to our checklists is the correlation of state standards to our ELL objectives so we are working on the same objectives as the general education classroom, sometimes we have to break the objective down to simpler concepts to meet the student at their instructional level, but our goal is for the students to be able to return to the general education classroom with enough language, skills and strategies so they can be successful. However they will not be fluent in all areas, they will need the expertise of the general education teacher to help them to reach mastery.
In addition to reading and writing objectives we are always have a Listening and Speaking objective since we are working with Language Acquisition skills in addition to Reading and Writing objectives so we are trying to get in twice the objectives mastered in our short ELL time. Below are links to our ELL checklists by grade level. We hope by sharing these checklists you will have a better idea of What do we ELL teachers do during our ELL time?
We have a Speaking and Listening Checklist, Writing checklist and Reading checklist. We keep a checklist on each student. These checklists are instrumental in how we fill out our ELL report cards.
K-1 ELL Speaking-Listening Checklist
Kindergarten ELL Reading Checklist
First Grade ELL Reading Checklist
Second Grade ELL Reading Checklist
2nd-5th grades ELL Speaking-Listening Checklist
Third-Fifth Grade ELL Reading Checklist
As you can see we have lots of objectives that we are working on. We have language objectives, content objectives, vocabulary objectives every lesson, every day. Please ask any ELL teachers if you have questions.