4 Apps for English Language Learners

As a beginning teacher, I think it is very important to find ways to tend to your EL learners. While you should never "dumb down" your lesson for your EL's, you should find creative and unique ways to include EL's in your lesson so they feel comfortable and reassured while learning.

Below are 4 applications that I found that work extremely well for English Language Learners. They all can be found on the IPAD which are becoming more and more prevalent in the classroom.

1. Intro to letters by Montessoreum (IPAD)- Intro to letters is perfect for EL learners. This app runs through all the letters of the English Alphabet, introducing them to the arrangement and pronunciation through tracing, audio, digital flashcards, and phonogram puzzles. This app will help EL’s not only learn the alphabet but say each letter phonetically correct. EL’s will further concrete these letters into their brains by tracing each letter out. This app is very dynamic!

2. Adventures for kids by Wirecloud (IPAD)- Adventures for kids is splendid for younger EL learners. This app is appropriate for children just absorbing English as a primary or secondary language. This app features mild, calm, and tender story based games that cherish and cultivate vocabulary skills through recurrence. This app will address vocabulary needs.

 

3. Rainbow sentences (IPAD)- Rainbow sentences is intended to assist EL’s in refining and enlightening their ability to construct grammatically correct sentences by using color coded visual cues. This app is great for visual learners. The who, what, where, and why parts of sentences are color coded to aid EL’s in distinguishing and comprehending  how combinations of these parts create basic sentence structure. Most kids are auditory or kinesthetic learners so I love that this app assists the more visual learning students.

                                              

4. Preposition builder (IPAD)- Preposition builder is intended to benefit elementary aged EL’s. This app works with students to learn the correct use of prepositions and it shows how prepositions can change the meaning of a sentence. The importance of these little words is magnified for the student and profound learning takes place. 

 

                                            

Teacher Resource: The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Using books to aid in research is a wonderful way to teach children to understand something inside and out.

A book is a better source than short, brief, and often strongly biased web resources. It’s also great to encourage kids to not just use online resources for their research as it just isn’t that reliable! An advantage to using books in research are that they are readily available to assessors, peer groups, and others conducting research.

My favorite way to use books in the classroom is to introduce topics or ideas. Having a fun playful story to introduce something to your students can really appeal to them. For example…..

 

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle is a great way to introduce and teach the life cycle of a butterfly. This book is about a very hungry caterpillar who arises from an egg and spends an entire week indulging on all kinds of foods, including strawberries, a lollipop, and a piece of pie. As he eats through each food, he also eats holes in the book big enough for little fingers to fit through. At the end of the week, he’s a very plump caterpillar with a tummy ache. He eats a leaf to dismiss his indigestion and builds a cocoon where he sleeps for two weeks. At the end of the second week, he appears as a lovely butterfly.

Having this vibrant book is perfect for pre-kindergarten to second grade. You could also introduce and teach counting and numbers as a math concept using this book. I would highly recommend this book because it is a fun, engaging, and colorful book that you can read to your students and teach them about the life cycle, numbers, and counting at the same time. Another great thing about this book is that there are a ton of additional resources to go along with it!

 

Strengths and Weaknesses:

The strengths of this book are that it had different fruits to go along with what he ate each day. It incorporates the days of the week which is important for students to know. This book had great pictures which is good for visual learners. The words are also comfortable enough for a small child to understand. Beginning readers can get through the book with little struggle. Towards the end of the book, it shows different types of foods that the caterpillar ate which forces kids to count what they see.  This book appeals to the hands on type of person because they can poke their finger through the holes. One weakness is that this book has incorrect information about the different foods that a caterpillar actually eats.

Tech Tool: Ipads in The Classroom

The ever so popular IPAD...everyone has one right? But have you ever thought to use an IPAD in the classroom for educational purposes?

I was initially like everyone else who thought IPads were only for personal use at home but to my surprise, after spending time in a technology classroom in Del Mar, I was shocked to see how much purpose an IPAD can have in a classroom.

IPad applications like prezi, and keynote allow for students to present their work in an exciting and innovative way. Mrs. Maskell, the teacher who I was observing all semester, used the IPAD in a clever way so that the students were being productive and staying on task. To avoid distraction, she would ask students to "turtle shell" their iPad face down and I really liked this technique. Students were also able to use the IPad to aid their research. One specific math project that I witnessed the students working on incorporated the use of an iPad so that students could take pictures of different angles. I though this was really neat.

One of my favorite IPad apps for the classroom is idea sketch. Idea sketch is a virtual mind map that students can use to brainstorm before they work on an assignment. The prewrite and brainstorming process is so important for students and having this as an app is amazing. Students become so involved in their brainstorming that their writing sometimes becomes illegible and this app provides something clear and concise.  Idea sketch is ideal for revision of subjects, but also can be used to plan out projects. After the students are done creating their mind map, they can save it as an image and use for reference.

Teacher Resource: 20 Minute ESL Lessons

This website has audio lessons that cover basic vocabulary for a variety of everyday situations, including office life. Each of the pages is designed to build communication skills, with a Listening and Discussion activity.

The English Language Development Standards it addresses is listening and speaking.

Age range: designed mainly for upper-beginning students and higher

My review of the website: I found this website to be a great resource for future teachers. It had tons of topics that were designed to serve as a short, self-enclosed mini lesson. It wasn’t as lively or animated as it could have been. I love how each page included a list of commonly-used vocabulary with a recording of the words, a short quiz to test comprehension, and a follow-up exercise for expanding students' use of the vocabulary in a conversation with a partner or group. I think hearing the language can be extremely beneficial to EL’s. I really liked how this could provide an opportunity for teachers to take home an audiotape of the learners. By doing so, the teacher can hear and evaluate their student’s oral language skills. Overall, I found this website extremely helpful for beginning teachers.  It gives teachers the opportunity to assign students to listen to the vocabulary and practice pronouncing the words on their own.

 

 

Pizzaz Website: Teacher Resource

P I Z Z A Z 

 

This website is a simple and creative writing resource that has oral storytelling activities with printable handouts for poetry, fictions, and bag of tricks. This site also uses poems and short stories as writing examples and exercises to teach creative writing and usage.

English Language Development Standards it addresses includes Speaking and Writing.

These activities can be used with all ages. They scale well to beginner through advanced level proficiency.

 Favorite Activity: Magazine Marvel

Students create stories from magazine picture collections. I think this is a great activity because it teaches students how to be creative with their writing based on images they find. This would be really fun in a 2nd or 3rd grade classroom. I would turn this activity into a lesson where they share their story orally after they find various images to craft their story.  

My review of the website was not too bad. While this site has some great activities, I didn’t find it as inviting and exciting. This website is geared more towards teachers and the resources that they can use to help English language learners. I really loved how they had poetry handouts. Poetry can help English language learners develop their oral skills as well. Poetry also is less intimidating and more manageable to memorize. I really love how poetry helps learners read and reread and provides ample opportunity to enunciate words. The repetition in poetry promotes fluency as well. I also loved how they had fiction handouts that can promote students creating and telling stories. Showing and telling can promote individuality in the classroom.
 

Teacher Resource: Vocabulary Can be Fun Website

An amazing teacher resource that I discovered was this wonderful website titled, "Vocabulary can be fun!"  This vocabulary website is a fun educational website dedicated to helping learners build reading, phonics, or English language skills. The website also has tons of online vocabulary words games such as crossword puzzles and hangman that allow students to practice vocab words. The vocabulary games are popular for use on smart boards to build vocabulary skills in classrooms.

The first thing that popped out to me about this educational website was that it was blue and yellow.

Being bright and interactive it really appeals to younger children and anyone who views this website is instantly hooked. I believe it is best suited for kindergarten through eighth grade.

Did I love it or hate it? I LOVED IT

I really loved this site because many of the word games are organized with dozens of categories of vocabulary lists that give learners plenty of opportunities to practice vocabulary. Young learners will love playing games and games will help learners develop their oral language skills as well. Games allow learners to practice what is taught in a fun and nonthreatening way. By making connections between words, ideas, and pictures, learners can build strong vocabulary skills! The enjoyment from playing games can help both native and foreign speakers of English build their English language vocabulary skills. There are many games for all levels of learning English which is a plus.
 

Pinterest

The content curation tool I chose was Pinterest. I have and continue to use Pinterest for personal use and I love the application and how user friendly it is. You don’t even need to be tech savy to maneuver through! One of the things I love about Pinterest is that it incorporates pictures. I am a visual learner so having pictures correlate to items you pin is very helpful and gives you an idea of what your about to look at. Pinterest serves as a virtual inspiration board and I plan to use Pinterest during my teaching credential program to grab wonderful ideas from other teachers.

From a teacher’s perspective, I love that Pinterest gives you the ability to study and absorb from other teachers who also have great ideas about lessons and school related stuff. Teaching is all about reflecting and learning how to do better the next time and Pinterest is a wonderful platform for new and beginning teachers to share what’s worked for them and what hasn’t.

My mother is a kindergarten teacher and she recently discovered how to use Pinterest. She only uses Pinterest for her classroom and has not only shared her own ideas but gained wonderful beliefs and opinions from other teachers. One of the main things she gets ideas for is how to decorate her classroom. I can’t tell you how many times I have gotten calls from her about a new “Pinterest idea” she has found!

I look forward to using Pinterest as my content curation tool because I can’t imagine how many helpful technology designs I will encounter. Pinterest will be a great platform for me to learn about the many different educational applications that have worked for so many teachers in their classroom.