Differentiating Instruction Whether you teach first grade or AP Calculus, your class is certain to have a variety of learners. Perhaps you have some ESL/ELL students, some learning support, some emotional support, some gifted, and some very “average.” TeachersFirst has resources to help you understand and adapt for student differences, including general ideas for any and all students and for specific student needs. For Any and All Students: Browse examples Many TeachersFirst resource reviews include differentiation suggestions and practical ways a resource can help you meet individual needs. For Specific Student Needs: Autism and Aspergers Find resources and information to help you understand and work with this increasing population. Adapt-a-Strategy for ESL/ELL Adapt your existing lesson plans using these simple strategies to help ESL students. Gifted Special Ed Special Ed regulations change frequently, and many are specific to your state.
Sentence Length Today's topic is sentence length. This episode was written by Bonnie Trenga, author of The Curious Case of the Misplaced Modifier. I was glad to hear from those of you who enjoyed Bonnie's writing last week. I'll be back as the writer next week, but Bonnie and other writers may continue to fill in for me on occasion as I start working on my next book and head out this summer for my book tour. Long Sentences My dad has a memorable poster in his bathroom: a diagram of a ridiculously long sentence by Marcel Proust. Sentence Fragments I have to applaud Proust for being able to keep everything straight in that sentence—because he sure used a lot of semicolons, commas, clauses, and other tricks to lengthen it. All of this Proust talk is making me hungry for a madeleine, a small shell-shaped cake that had a starring role in In Search of Lost Time. Finding the Proper Length Proust’s enormous sentence is an anomaly, but long sentences certainly haven’t disappeared. Finding and Fixing Long Sentences
Salsa Teach Young Children Spanish with Salsa! Salsa is Georgia Public Broadcasting's award-winning Spanish language series for young learners in kindergarten through the third grade. Puppets in familiar stories, digital graphics and animation teach the language. Who Can Use Salsa? Instructors do not need to be certified to teach a foreign language or be familiar with Spanish in order to use Salsa. There are 42 video lessons in the Salsa series. Watch Salsa: Salsa airs on GPB Kids Saturdays at 12 p.m. . You can also watch Salsa online. Own Salsa: You can buy all 42 episodes of Salsa. What Is Your Learning Style? What Is Your Learning Style? This quiz asks 24 questions and will take less than five minutes to complete. Try not to think too hard -- just go with your first thought when describing your daily activities and interests. By the end, you may have some new insights into your learning preferences. Editor's Note (2013): There is no scientific evidence, as of yet, that shows that people have specific, fixed learning styles or discrete intelligences, nor that students benefit when teachers target instruction to a specific learning style or intelligence.
18 Fun and Simple Creative Writing Activities Some of you teachers may be a John Keating in the making. Still more may need a little help. Here are some creative writing activities and prompts that will honor your students’ imaginations. Let them free their muses to soar. I had great creative writing teachers when I was in high school. They were very passionate about literature. Creative Writing Activities to Explore This terrific list of activities come from Marcus Roskilly in the UK: Free Writing—5 minutes to write on a “spark word” determined by the teacher. Other Engaging Approaches Here are some select writing activities from Caroline Swicegood: Life is Not Like a Box of Chocolates: Use the prompt: “Life is like a box of…” You fill in the blank and go from there.No-Send Letters: If you know you’ll never send a letter to someone of your choice, what would you write on it? Creative Writing Prompts Some prompts from Buzzfeed’s 23 Of The Most Creative College Essay Prompts From 2014–2015
Celebrate Hispanic Heritage! Home Sign in -or- Register PRIVACY POLICY · Terms of Use · TM ® & © 2016 Scholastic Inc. All Rights Reserved. Does grammar matter? - Andreea S. Calude Spoken language has been neglected and marginalized for much of our history on account of its perceived inferiority in comparison to written language. Written language was historically regarded as the language of the ‘learned,’ given that few people could read or write. It also had permanence (written records can be preserved for hundreds of years, and it is only recently that speech recordings became an achievable technology for most of us), and it was thought to be of a higher standard and quality (often summed up as having “better” or more “correct” grammar). You can read more about this biased view of written language over spoken language in the online book “The Written Language Bias” by Peter Linell. We all know that languages differ with respect to their grammar – we have all tried to learn another language only to be baffled not just by new vocabulary but also by the order and other quirks of how that language organizes its vocabulary – but what can and what does actually vary?
10 Resources for ESL & Foreign Language Students While writing about LangMedia yesterday I realized that I've reviewed a lot of resources for foreign language and ESL/EFL students and teachers over the last couple of years. Here are ten of the better free resources for foreign language and ESL/EFL students. Smart.fm is a free service designed to help you learn languages, mathematics, and history independently. At it's most basic, Smart.fm provides a flashcard-like service for learning languages, learning formulas, and learning facts. Vocabulix provides numerous free tools for learning Spanish, German, or English. Forvo can best be described as an audio wiki for word pronunciations. CAPL, Culturally Authentic Pictorial Lexicon, is a project developed by Dr. The Story Place is a children's digital library produced by the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg counties in North Carolina. Verbs Online provides foreign language students with a good selection of activities for practicing verb conjugations.
Why is there a "b" in doubt? - Gina Cooke This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago. We all know certain spelling errors are very common, such as miniscule or geneology. But how common exactly, and are they getting more or less common as time goes on? Spelling is the writing of one or more words with letters and diacritics. On the history of spelling. by the Rev. Real Spelling www.realspelling.com WordWorks www.wordworkskingston.com Real Spellers www.realspellers.org This is a past TED conversation. For other language and literature lessons from TED-Ed, check out this YouTube playlist:
11 Foreign Language Resources to Try in 2011 Yesterday's list of 11 good resources to try in 2011 featured health and physical education resources. Last week I featured 55 other good resources to try in 2011. Today, I have 11 good foreign language resources to try in 2011 (I've included a couple of ESL/EFL resources in this list). Forvo can best be described as an audio wiki for word pronunciations. One of the problems with learning to speak a language that is not phonetic is trying to figure out how to pronounce the words. Forvo hosts hundreds of recordings of word pronunciations by native speakers. WordSteps is a resource for learning the vocabulary of your choice of nine languages. LangMedia, produced by Five Colleges Incorporated, provides resources for learning languages less-commonly offered by high schools and colleges in the US. Voxy is an interesting approach to helping ESL students learn English. Repeat After Us is an online library of copyright-free English texts and audio recordings.