Happy 4-Day Week Teachers of Emergent Bilinguals! I hope you had a restful day off this Wednesday commemorating Yom Kippur. Last week, I laid out basic steps for lesson planning for language and literacy in Stand Alone. I have full confidence that you know how to teach your students vocabulary, sentence frames or stems for speaking and writing, and practice reading comprehension around a topic. However, I’d like to help with lesson planning for targeted linguistic skills that our students need to advance in their English acquisition – a key aspect often missing from Stand Alone.
linguistic skills, now through november
If you haven’t already, you can download my scope and sequence of linguistic skills and read more about them here! We will follow this scope and sequence all year. From now until approximately Thanksgiving, we are focusing on oral language and vocabulary, phonological awareness, as well as alphabetic knowledge and simple sentences. More specifically, introduce and practice:
- choral repetition of words and phrases
- making meaning from pictures, videos, gestures, and pointing
- connecting meanings of words to the Home Language orally ( and in writing)
- speaking first words and sentences
- listening and identify the beginning sound of the word, for example school /s/
- matching the sound to a letter, for example What says /s/ as in school? ‘s’
- learning the alphabet in sequence and reciting the letters
- learn the letter strokes and model writing position and pencil grip
- underlining and copying target vocabulary words in text
- learning and responding to Wh-question words, specifically Who? and What? for nouns and Is what/Does what? for verbs
For slide templates with these activities on them that you can copy and paste into your lessons and adjust, see my linguistic skills routines.
Integrate the instruction and practice of these linguistic skills as part of the 180 minutes of instruction in the week, after introducing your topic and vocabulary, and before or after reading the text. Right now, your students need vocabulary and comprehension. As we get further into the school year, we will be spending more and more time teaching phonics, morphology, and grammar!
sample topics and lessons
Need ideas for the first weeks of instruction? Check out my sample lessons This is my School, This is my Classroom, and I study English as a New Language, with accompanying materials.
Teachers, as always – comment below with questions and stay tuned for more linguistic skills!
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