Your Home Town Learning Center

By kingmi - About Me - E-mail this page - Add to My Favorites - Add to Blog List - See other blogs in Education

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

You can't rely on remembering everything you've learned. You have to cram!!

Yesterday I told my students that we were all going to be competing for the highest scores on an academic assessment test in two weeks. I gave them quite a pep rally. I told them that not only would we be competing with ESL students across the country, but we would be competing school by school,... Sign in to see full entry.

Monday, February 13, 2006

Bloggers Compete for National Attention....................................

The State of Iowa has decided on an English Language Assessment test for now. It is somewhat psychometric, which I like. My students will do better on a multiple choice test as they have been reading and writing all year. They are accustomed to trying to get the meaning out of a sentence and... Sign in to see full entry.

Thursday, February 9, 2006

This blogger never gives up!...............................................

Academic review, in the midst of a headlong rush toward literacy fluency is mandatory. The life of an uprooted and transplanted organism is troubled at best. They experience three levels of culture shock. How this affects them is that they cannot fully learn for retention, the way regular education... Sign in to see full entry.

Friday, February 3, 2006

Blogger to the rescue............

Two weeks ago, on a day when we didn't have an interpreter in the building, the phone rang. On the line was a distraught and angry mother speaking Spanish so fast I could only catch about half of what she was saying. After some slowing her down and calming her down, I figured out that she was... Sign in to see full entry.

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

This Blogger is at War...................................................

We are in the fifth week of journaling. Our walls are plastered with full-page journal entries, some dittoed from their journals, others untimely ripped from their notebooks. Many very interesting pictures and other artwork accompanying journal entries, to which I credit the little boy whose father... Sign in to see full entry.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Blogger must change or die.................................................

We had an unexpected visitor yesterday afternoon. His daughter is a Newcomer in our 8th grade class. After two months she is not speaking English and he wanted to know what was going on? "You mean to say she cannot speak even one word of English?" In self-defense I reached for the Oxford Picture... Sign in to see full entry.

Friday, January 20, 2006

The Three-minute Walk-around Classroom Observation Technique In-Service

You would guess that as uncommon as it might appear, the principal of your school hosting the district's middle school principals for a day or two, would not disrupt the classes. However, this particular in-service, for administrators only, was the topic that all teachers despise, that the... Sign in to see full entry.

Thursday, January 12, 2006

"There's plenty of space out in the hall and in the cafeteria." Big smiles!

I think I was writing before about introducing journal writing to the second half of the year. My students are all writing. Every student every day, whether in Spanish or English, is writing. (We have one little girl from Laos, third month Newcomer, who is writing in English!) Please bear in mind,... Sign in to see full entry.

Thursday, January 5, 2006

Took the words right outta my mouth must have been while you were reading

Been great being back. Holidays were terrific family time, but I do enjoy teaching. My lesson plan has worked like magic. It is amazing the progress that non-proficient English Language Learners achieve doing auditory cloze (like dictation). That's what we did for four weeks between Thanksgiving and... Sign in to see full entry.

Wednesday, January 4, 2006

"Good job" she said. I was pleased. This is like the ultimate compliment.

Today, the first thing I did in our first day back from winter holiday was to alter my lesson plan. I wrote on it "3-day plan". It was way too much for one day, considering that I was introducing a whole new type of writing strategy. See previous post for details of the journaling we began today. In... Sign in to see full entry.

About this Blog

Research and classrom practice have documented huge gains for ESL students when both inductive and deductive teaching methods are incorporated. Traditional use of deductive teaching have led to a National dropout rate of 44.4%.

People

Blogs

Headlines (What is this?)