Happy Mid Winter Recess teachers! I hope you are taking full advantage of your vacation to relax and recharge. In this post, I am featuring Spanish Language resources and bilingual classroom Language Arts units from a few of my students at the College of Staten Island, CUNY who are in the process of acquiring their Bilingual Extension Certificates (while managing their own classrooms full-time!).
Study after study shows that bilingual education, specifically Dual Language classrooms, produces superior academic outcomes for English learners. When both the Home language and English are developed simultaneously, students are able to use their full linguistic resources to learn the content of school.
My students worked very hard last semester to research valuable Home Language resources for teachers in bilingual classrooms, as well as create units for English and Native Language Arts for Dual Language classrooms. Read about Spanish language resources below and see a Grade 1_English Language Arts Mini-Unit and Grade 1_Spanish Language Arts Mini-unit here!
Spanish Language Resources for elementary classrooms
by Glorivee, Spanish-English bilingual elementary teacher
As a new teacher, making sure you are prepared with the tools to best support your students is a crucial task to take on, especially when you don’t even know where to begin looking.
As a veteran teacher, with all the technology advances and mandates to integrate it into your everyday learning, it all seems too overwhelming.
Many times, you graduate with the best understanding of content and pedagogical knowledge, but when you are released into the real world of teaching, do you truly feel prepared?
Imagine graduating as a bilingual teacher, starting your first day at a school and realizing that your students are not as engaged as you had planned for them to be. What went wrong?
Now, you notice halfway through the end of September that you are running out of books to read, your students are now tired of using the iPad, but wait, these are IPADS – kids should love using these!! Not with those boring basic reading apps….
Well, you my friend are in luck, I have some wonderful resources I would LOVE to share with you that have literally made teaching bilingual students so much more fun!
Resource: Canticosworld.com
Canticos is very interactive, engaging, and fun! This app has books, videos, and games in two languages: English and Spanish. A great perk is that it’s ad free, so there won’t be any wanderers going to other websites because they accidentally clicked on a link.
The app was developed by bilingual educators, so you know this means a lot! They believe in learning through play, which is an important component when searching for a resource we will use for our students. The library comes with tons of e-books that have the features to choose from such as: “Read to me”, “Sing to me”, “Read by myself”. This builds the vocabulary students need as they learn to read.
Cost: It has a free 7-day trial, which I used with my own students and it has been the best 7 days ever! They have monthly and yearly options and are always advertising sales on their Instagram page. So, I suggest you add them as well on your social media and keep an eye out.
Overall: This is great for elementary grade students. I’m not sure how our middle schoolers would enjoy this app, but it is surely a hit with our little ones!
Resource: readbrightly.com
I happened to stumble on this website when searching for different books to read with my bilingual students. It was created by Melissa Taylor who is a teacher and a writer from Colorado. It goes on by explaining what we know: bilingual books offer children the chance to develop a second language and encourages oral language development which is the foundation for reading.
This website has a huge variety of books to choose from. When you find the book you like, it gives you a description of the book, an “add to cart” button which will direct you to “penguinrandomhouse.com” to purchase it, and other retailers that carry the book as well.
In the bilingual section of the site, there are 15 books to choose from, which will suit your bilingual students ranging from the younger grade levels to higher grades as well.
Cost: FREE to view the different books you can possibly purchase; the link will then tell you the cost for each.
Overall: This is a great way to get ideas on books you can buy to expand your library and read in your bilingual classroom.
Thanks readers and look out for more guest posts coming soon!
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