My first reading reflection is from one of the articles we were required to read. My book is on back order and should be in sometime this week (Thanks, Amazon). Nevertheless, here is reflection #1!
The article, entitled Reading Supports for All, by Fitzgerald and Graves, is about how teachers can better reach English Language Learners through reading exercises. Teachers are shown multiple instances in which scaffolding enables the ELL's to make their own connections from their native language into English.
Teachers are also introduced to SRE's (Scaffolding Reading Experiences). SRE's are frameworks in which teachers facilitate learning through the text. The SRE's allow the teacher to "slice" goals for the ELL's. This "slicing" refers to how goals should be tailored to the ELL's capabilities. The lesson would then be suitable for ALL students regardless of their native language.
In math, I could use the pre-reading activities to preteach the important vocabulary terms. I could have the ELL's focus on the single most important term. The students could read a few paragraphs of the chapter to get a basis. The ELL's would be able to focus on what they know and/or look at the numerical depictions of the procedure. I could then break the students into groups in order for them to teach one another. The students could share their knowledge. The discussion aspect for ELL's is probably the most important take-away from this article, in my opinion.
WA
I like the idea Wes. One suggestion I have is maybe before assigning the pre reading, you could make an English-Spanish translation sheet with the words you would like for them to focus on. That way they could see it in both languages and make the connections so that they can connect them once again in the future.
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