Teacher Centered Websites for Teaching ELLs

Teaching Strategies

·         http://aldnetwork.org/content/test5

•         This website provides many strategies involving ELLs. The article I read in particular gave strategies to use in regards to the common core and ELLs. The strategies are general enough that you can apply them to all ages and levels of English. The negatives are it doesn’t give you background information, so if you haven’t had experience with common core you would need to do additional research in other sections of the website.
•           There are many articles on this website that I think would be beneficial to look over on my own time. This is professional development done at home essentially. I will definitely be using the additional resources tab because it covers things from common core to lesson plans.

Lesson Plan

·         http://www.tesol.org/connect/tesol-resource-center/search-details/lesson-plans/2013/12/09/intercultural-holiday-party-planning

•          This lesson plan involves celebrating holidays in a culturally sensitive manner. The students get to practice research skills and then celebrate the holiday they researched. It could still be difficult to make sure all students are not offended/or being reached, but the research part could be geared towards finding a country first. Another negative could be that students may not have previous research background so they would not know how to begin.
•          This website provided a lot of different types of resources for ELLs (I.e. assessments, lesson plans, and activities). It can be organized by the type you are looking for, but not by age or English level. I could find a lot of fun activities to implement in the classroom using this site.

Songs + Activity Questions

·         http://mondostoppops.blogspot.com/?

•          This website has many resources for teaching ELLs and one of my favorites is the song section. It gives great popular songs for ELLs to listen to and provides questions for you to ask your students. I think that using songs you would actually hear on the radio allows students to hear what words are commonly used. The negative is that the songs are probably best to be used in high school classrooms, but not necessarily.

Professional Development

·         http://busyteacher.org/

•          This website has many great resources for teaching all kinds of students, with a great section for teaching ELLs. There are a lot of great articles that allow for professional development and bettering your teaching. There are also many worksheets available for students to use. I could see myself spending hours after work reading these articles that give great tips on how to teach ELLs.