Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Quick Resource

For those of you that have native Spanish-speaking ESL students in your classroom, here is a book recommendation that will really help a lot: NTC's Dictionary of Spanish Cognates Thematically Organized (Nash 1990). You can find it here. Freeman and Freeman (2004) state, "One way that etchers can help student develop both content-specific and general academic vocabulary is through the student of cognates" (p. 210). Studying cognates, particularly thematically, is really helpful in developing your student's academic vocabulary. I hope you'll check it out!

Monday, March 10, 2014

Resources for Teaching Subject-Verb Agreement

Subject-Verb agreement is an area of particular difficulty for ESL students, largely due to English's complex verb system and the differences in "rules" among languages. Here are some resources to help you plan.

Activities:
http://www.eslgamesplus.com/subject-verb-agreement-game/
http://www.ehow.com/info_8397360_activities-teaching-subjectverb-agreement.html

Anchor charts:
http://www.pintrest.com/search/pins/?q=subject%20verb%20agreement%20anchor%20chart&rs=ac&len=12

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Rethinking Spelling


Here is an interesting article that will probably make you rethink the way you were taught/teach spelling. The article also includes some tips on how to help your students become better spellers. Enjoy!

Thursday, February 20, 2014

More Resources for Teaching Pronouns

English uses many pronouns--singular and plural, masculine and feminine. This can be a difficult concept to understand for an ESL student, particularly if their native language has different rules or not as many pronouns options. Here are some resources to help you as you lesson plan.

Videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJDIEs4wEdQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koZFca8AkT0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh62KQ7mujA

Activities:
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/281404676688124932/
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/88594327642304913/
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/64809682110049469/

Thursday, February 6, 2014

Resources for Teaching Capital Letters


There are many times that we use capital letters in English, and this list of "rules" can be overwhelming for an ESL student, particularly if their native language has very different rules on capitalization. For example, in Spanish, the days of the week and months of the year are not capitalized, nor is the pronoun for "I". With this background, you can see that it would be difficult for a native Spanish speaker to correctly use capitalization rules. Here are some resources to help you as you lesson plan.

Activities:

Lesson Plans:


YouTube: