Regardless of what content area or grade level you teach, providing support to your ELL (English Language Learner) students is probably a conversation that your administration has brought up multiple times. Often, the same strategies that best support ELLs work best for all students. So, whether you have students that have been identified as ELL or ESL (English as a Second Language), let me encourage you to explore the following resources to see what strategies you can add to your pedagogical repertoire. My go-to list includes:
- Five-Minute Film Festival: 8 Videos for ELL Classrooms Besides sharing a great foundation of videos to use, Larry Ferlazzo via Edutopia gives insights on how to use the videos and offers some additional video resources at the end of the article. For more great articles from Edutopia regarding supporting ELL learners, visit this website.
- Modifying Thinking Maps for ELL Students This presentation, created by a K-8 school in New York city, clearly details eight different thinking maps and how to integrate them with ELL students of different levels. Scaffolding ideas are also shared. They also have the presentation offered as a downloadable PDF.
- For holiday activities for your ELLs, consider the list of Google search results of websites, images, PDFs, or PowerPoint presentations.
- And, of course, no resource list would be complete without referencing Larry Ferlazzo’s resources. Start by going to his English website, which provides an organized list of ELL support for various content areas. If you find his resources as useful as I do, then let me encourage you to take it to the next level and add him (@Larryferlazzo) to your PLN for daily snippets of support, strategies, and resources.