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Reading Comprehension Worksheets: The Basics of Text Comprehension to Teach.
Why Reading Comprehension is Hard. Download this free sample of the reading comprehension worksheets to use with creating a summary. Elementary school students usually have a hard time responding to literature and being engaged in reading comprehension activities. This may be explained by a couple of reasons: Students who are still learning to decode put a lot of effort and attentional resources into reading the letters and words. It goes without saying that thinking beyond the code of text for emerging and beginner readers is often hard. Understanding the text beyond the code (letters, words, sentences) requires metacognition, or thinking about their own thinking. Elementary students just start developing their…
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How “WIDA Can-Do Charts” Help Me Plan and DifferentiateInstruction for English Language Learners?
What is WIDA Can-Do Chart? The WIDA Can-Do Descriptors document is a number-one tool I make sure to fill out at the beginning of the school year. For those who need to refresh your memory, WIDA Can-Do Chart provides examples of academic language use for four specific communicative purposes: Reading, Writing, Listening, and Speaking. The information you need to fill out WIDA Can-Do Chart is ACCESS scores of your ELLs available through your ACCESS coordinator or Ellevation.com platform for which you would have an account from your school. In my school, I have an account on Ellevation.com where I download the WIDA ELP Standards Report. I look through each student’s…
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How to Motivate Reluctant ESL Students and Build Their Independence.
As a new teacher, I have understood that some of the things I couldn’t function without from day one are classroom routines, clear explanation of consequences for misbehavior and non-completion of tasks, clear statement of expectations from each task. Taking care of those is a learning process, but in the end, it pays off. One of the things that caught me off guard is the fact that students do not necessarily have accountability for their work. They tend to shift the ownership of their completed assignments to me, hoping I will magically turn them into A graded papers. So the question my students have been driving me bananas with is…
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Is Google Translation Benefiting ESL Students or Harming Them?
Today I want to talk about the problem of Google translation for assignments in an ESL classroom. To give you an idea how painful it can be not only to an ESL teacher but any teacher, let me describe a scene in one of my classes. It’s an English as a Second Language class, level A which means that students are beginner learners of the language. Although they have language basics, they continue developing their vocabulary, learn how to connect ideas logically and grammatically correct. Some of them might have the struggle to write a sentence. Some of them can create a pretty good paragraph and more. The task students…
