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1. photojournalism project - students are encouraged to create news stories to show culture. One student wrote about quinceaneras, another about her sister's first communion celebration, etc.

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1. photojournalism project - students are encouraged to create news stories to show culture. One student wrote about quinceaneras, another about her sister's first communion celebration, etc.

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2. Letters to the Editor - Students were required to write a letter of praise about something or someone in the community or offer a suggestion of something to add to our community. Several students praised and promoted our local annual Latino festival. The local newspaper selected some to publish.

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We begin the year with a fun quiz with questions about ourselves. We create a class game (Kahoot!) that helps with team building. But it also allows students to share a fact about themselves. From that one question they think of a few more and it becomes an outline for a writing assignment. They can write about their migration journey, or their home country or even just about their interests. This eventually becomes a project/presentation and the students have an opportunity to share it with the rest of the school. None of this is forced but I'm always amazed at how eager every student is to share about their culture, their home land, their identity.

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I love using diverse books to celebrate our differences and embrace our similarities with others.
The book: Show Way by Jacqueline Woodson is a book that we read in 2-5th grade. We learn how our family's values and cultures make us who we are and we need to learn to value them and appreciate them. After reading the book each students creates a self-reflect square that shows what he/she loves and appreciates about their family. We put it together to create a class quilt, we share among ourselves then we display for all to see!

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as published on the NCTE blog
http://blogs.ncte.org/index.php/2017/09/students-right-need-read-diverse-books/
Windows and mirrors. Our students are asked to study characters and to connect to them ... It's important that they are exposed to/and are given opportunities to get to know characters that look and live like them.

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I am very excited to be back in a PYP oriented school. The Role of Language and the language policy is so supportive of L1-mother tongue. I can think of translanguaging strategies/tools -We are so fortunate at this school/heavily Chinese speakers and we have awesome instructional classroom assistants that can support their mother tongue. I am working with the assistants at my grade level this year (i am new here) and my goal is to support them to reach theirs-which this year, they picked: supporting ELLs in the classrooms. 

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I am very excited to be back in a PYP oriented school. The Role of Language and the language policy is so supportive of L1-mother tongue. I can think of translanguaging strategies/tools -We are so fortunate at this school/heavily Chinese speakers and we have awesome instructional classroom assistants that can support their mother tongue. I am working with the assistants at my grade level this year (i am new here) and my goal is to support them to reach theirs-which this year, they picked: supporting ELLs in the classrooms. 

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THIS translanguaging TOOL is awesome, from CUNY, in NY. http://www.nysieb.ws.gc.cuny.edu/files/2012/06/FINAL-Translanguaging-Guide-With-Cover-1.pdf
I am now interested in learning more about UDL - Universal Design for Learning to see how they incorporate that approach in a culturally responsive environment. Here is the link to that book: Culturally responsive design for ELLs. http://castpublishing.org/books-media/culturally-responsive-design/

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I shared these two videos @ #ELLChat_Bkclub, but thought I would repost here. Both address language and identity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE-c4Bj_RT0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLI4Y5GLzzI

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Connecting Key Concepts and Central Ideas to Home Language

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Connecting Key Concepts and Central Ideas to Home Language

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I currently teach in an IB/PYP school and we have 6 units through out the year. These units have concepts and central learning targets that drive the students inquiry into the topic. One of the very first things I do is have the students translate the key concepts and central ideas into their own language (the best they can). Often these concepts/ideas are a bit abstract when the students first start the inquiry. So I send the student translations home to their families in hopes that they will discuss what they think they will be learning about with together. Throughout our initial explorations into the topic, we have a lot of discussions about what the students know (prior knowledge) and what their experiences are within the topic. The topics are usually designed with the international student in mind, so they really do lend themselves nicely to allowing the students to bring their global perspectives to their inquiries. I really believe that by triggering their prior knowledge through the connection of home language and allowing them to bring their own experiences to the discussions/learning allows them to connect to the concepts/ideas more. It usually makes the students more confident in their learning.

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We often affirm ourselves when meet others who are like us. What better way to help our students meet others, but through characters in books. I purposefully choose novels or picture books so students can identify in some way with the story and characters. When they see themselves in literature or read about someone facing similar challenges, they may (hopefully) affirm their struggles are real and valid.
Novel ideas: Esperanza Rising, The Circuit, Dragonwings, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane ( great journey story), Walk Two Moons (great story about dealing with loss)
Picture books: My Name is Yoon, My Name is Jorge on Both Sides of the River,

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I think home visits are a great way to affirm student's identities because 1) visiting their home/meeting their family members shows them you care and 2) seeing their home environment firsthand gives you so many points of entry to incorporate aspects of their lived experiences/their identity into the classroom/lesson context. It's a great way for teachers to foster connections with students. My school was trained by this organization and it was fabulous: http://www.pthvp.org/

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I have learned so much from the conversations and translations of ideas from our book that participants have shared. I can't wait to hear what comes from chapter 3.

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3 Ways of Building Oral Curriculum From Students' Oral Grammar

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3 Ways of Building Oral Curriculum From Students' Oral Grammar

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Listen, Talk Ask

Here we are on the brink of another academic year. Amid the planning and meeting, setting up your room, and catching up with colleagues, there exists a palpable buzz. Soon, if they haven't already, a new group of students will enter your room, and you will begin the exciting process of learning with each other.

At the beginning of the year, our most important task is to establish community and to get to know our students. Language is one of the ways student express their identity (Allen, 2010; Nieto, 2009). When we use worksheets to assess students' grammar, we decontextualize language from who they are. But, when we pay attention to how students use language to express who they are, we are able to meaningfully connect their rich backgrounds to our language and grammar curriculums. As JoBeth Allen (2010) stated so eloquently:

Home language. It's a comforting phrase - isn't it? - conjuring images of families chatting around the television, dinner table, or front porch; of dads or grandmas telling stories about relatives' escapades, of moms or grandpas crooning the baby to sleep; of siblings and cousins making up games and arguing about the rules. Yet too often in our country's educational history, we have at best ignored home language as a valuable linguistic resource and at worst denigrated and even prohibited its use in school. (pp. 27-28)

Many researchers and teachers agree with Allen, and have pushed for schools to be a place in which multiple linguistic codes are integrated and accepted as valid ways of speaking (Hudley & Mallinson, 2011). As bell hooks (1994) stated, "It is evident that we must change conventional ways of thinking about language, creating spaces where diverse voices can speak in words other than [Standardized] English" (p. 173-174).

Based on her own experiences and speaking to African American families, Lisa Delpit (1995) has argued for schools to strike a balance between silencing students' home dialects and languages, and encouraging their use of these codes in all academic settings. While Delpit cautioned teachers that students would become increasingly disinterested in a school program that continually ignored their home and cultural identities, she also maintained her assertion that it does linguistically diverse children a disservice to not teach them how to speak using the "culture of power" that is often, if unfairly, prized in job interviews, office discourse, and term papers.

Classrooms, then, must provide students with a language and grammar curriculum that invites multiple codes into the conversation, as a way to build communal understanding of the validity of languages and dialects beyond Standardized English.

It is with this in mind that I challenge you, at the beginning of another promising school year, to consider the following: What would it look like if your approach to grammar study invited children to build on background experiences in order to learn standards-based content in relevant ways?

There is one simple, three-step strategy: listen, talk, ask. It takes little time, and you can use it in conjunction with an already existing grammar program:

Step 1. Listen

Listen to the way your students speak while in different contexts (with friends on the playground, with teachers in the hallway, as they think out loud about the dialogue they are considering for a written personal narrative). Keep a record of these phrases, and the context(s) in which students speak them. Are you finding patterns? Are your students using Standardized English in certain contexts, and not in others? Do particular children speak Spanish with their family or Spanish-speaking friends, but know to switch to English when communicating with others?

Step 2. Talk

Talk with your students about diverse ways of speaking. Bring up specific phrases or sentences you have heard, in multiple dialects, languages, or levels of formality. Draw their attention to the fact that they likely use different wording with their friends on the playground than with their teachers in the classroom. Make these conversations part of your school day. When they hear interesting examples of language, encourage children to write them down or share them with the class.

Ask students questions that build from the language they already use. For instance, if you are studying subject/verb agreement, and the children need to circle "be" or "am" in the sentence I (be/am) walking to school, you might present the sentence, and then say, "Now, when we complete sheets like this, we are usually thinking about how we speak in more formal settings, with people we don't know very well, or while giving a speech or presentation. Which word would you use in these more formal settings?" This approach does not prize one way of speaking over another. Instead of shutting down some students' home languages/dialects, it uses multiple codes to encourage critical thinking and engagement with grammar.

By using the listen, talk, ask strategy, you and your students can start to build an authentic and relevant grammar curriculum. This, in turn, will increase the chances that your students will commit this information to their long term memories, as they can connect what they are learning to already familiar language contexts.

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3 Ways Of Building Curriculum From Students' Oral Grammar

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Here we are on the brink of another academic year. Amid the planning and meeting, setting up your room, and catching up with colleagues, there exists a palpable buzz. Soon, if they haven't already, a new group of students will enter your room, and you will begin the exciting process of learning with each other.