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Fortunately, most of my volunteer teaching experience prior to teachers college was with ESL students, from children as young as pre school to adults who had just moved to Canada. After watching the videos that I chose, I noticed that I had been incorporating similar strategies in classrooms. My practicum is also in a grade 4,5,6 special ed and several of the students are new to Canada and many of them as ESL. My AT is so wonderful with them and is always usual visual aids to help them. She also uses a lot of hand gestures and makes sure her volume is appropriate. I feel grateful to have this rich experience in a special ed with many English language learners because I believe it will help me to be a better teacher and give me the tools I need to help these kids succeed.

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For me, the use of visuals and non-verbal cues is super important. Being able to use non-verbal communication helps enormously when speaking with ELLs in my classroom.
Visuals and non-verbal cues fall directly into my expressive style of speaking and help even when students can't see my mouth or whole face due to the mask covering. I find that most of the students in my practicum class are visual learners and it helps to either make them draw out the problems (for example: Math word problems) and trying to go through the word problems they don't understand together in pieces rather than all in one sentence.
Another thing I've noticed is the use of technology for independent study and group projects. As technology has advanced, there are programs and ways to translate words from one language to another at the press of a button. This helps ELLs in my class with learning certain vocabulary.

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Tom Deng
The class I do practicum in is an ELD class. ELD is for students not only didn't speak English, but also didn't go to school. These kids are most refugees from Middle-East and East Africa. I found it difficult to teach some ELD kids counting in English. The English way of saying 10, 20, 30,... is confusing.   In Arabic, they say "two 10s" for 20, "three 10s" for 30, so and so forth. So I am thinking about using visual assistant to explain counting to the kids next time in class. I will put up 10 objects and let them know that it is "ten". I will put up 20 objects and let them know that it is "two tens", so and so forth. In this way, the kids can make connections among the number of objects they see, Arabic language for it, and "number of tens" in English. After they gain the sense of numbers, Is can then help them to associate "two tens, three tens, four tens..." with "twenty, thirty, forty..."

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There is a new student who recently joined the class in my practicum. She is an ELL and as my first day with her last Wednesday, I found out that she does not understand instructions given to her. A great idea I found in the Ontario Ministry document Supporting English Language Learners: A practical guide for Ontario educators, is to "[p]rovide bilingual and picture dictionaries and picture cards to assist students in creating their own bilingual dictionary" (p. 58). I believe this to be a great idea in which the student will enjoy working on and creating. It will also be very handy and useful as she gets stuck and is not able to understand activity instructions like last time. Therefore, I will definitely suggest this to my AT.

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My use of key visuals as a teacher is something I am constantly trying to improve on and that I hope becomes a constant in my future classroom. While I am certainly fortunate to be working with students who all speak English fluently in my practicum, inclusion of related visuals can only improve my delivery of content to all students.

Having been trained as an actor, I find that many key points in the "Supporting English Language Learners: A practical guide for Ontario educators" document are present in my daily classroom proceedings (despite my overall inexperience teaching): I can be and have been very expressive, take “dramatic” pauses for comprehension, and integrate vocal strategies and facial expressions to highlight key words within the lesson.

As I find these helpful strategies come naturally to me in delivering information, I often think of “myself” as the visual. For example, when reading one of my picture books to the class on the first Wednesday, I included strategies such as acting out what the characters were doing and adding exaggerated body language to accompany the “angry”, “worried”, and “upset” voices. As a result, I didn’t consider additional visual strategies for comprehension, such as playing a read-along video of the book’s pages (with no sound) or incorporating .jpeg files of related everyday examples of the story's themes on the projector, that could have built on students’ visual literacies. I interpreted engagement with my reading as equal engagement with the pictures, even though I was simply showing the open book to my seated class. I don’t know how many students could have benefitted from these tools but what's important is ensuring I don’t leave that on the table.

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In my practicum, I have been very lucky to have been placed in such a diverse class of student learners.  The students in my classes exemplify the imperative need to differentiate for students that will allow themselves to work in a way that is conducive towards achieving standards at their respected grade levels as indicated in specifications in the Ontario curriculum.  Specifically, my AT has demonstrated the various ways that differentiation for ESL and ELL learners in a French immersion class can be achieved, without the process of creating various lessons plans and goals for the class.
In the documents Making Language and Content Accessible for English Language Learners, it exemplifies many strategies and tools that are useful to apply in practice. Specifically in learning how to address and communicate with students better, this document highlights some important features that would be helpful in creating strong teacher-student relationships that I hope to utilize further in my practicum.

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Funnily enough, in developing my integrated lesson plan, I incorporated some of the values and strategies that both the video and article I chose suggested.
I actually plan to use that lesson plan in my practicum placement because I think it would be a great way to have students consider how to transfer reading comprehension into images, since sometimes that can be easier than coming up with words. The class I'm in is a grade 8 class and there don't appear to be any ESL  students, but through conversations with my AT I do know that some of the students are struggling with their literacy skills — especially because of the online classes from the pandemic.
My AT finds that their reading comprehension skills are lacking, and I have seen first hand that students sometimes have a hard time communicating what they know from the reading into words.
I didn't necessarily design my integrated lesson plan with this in mind at first, but I think it would be a great way to help the students develop their reading comprehension since they would be transferring their understanding of the story into images, rather than words.
In addition, I think the Making Language and Content Accessible document has an incredible amount of tips that apply to more than just ELL students. In any classroom with any students, it is important to provide clear instructions, model non-verbal cues, and use visual representations when possible. This is just good practice given that all students, depending on their background or the type of learner they are, will benefit from this kind of instruction.
Overall, I'm incredibly excited for the opportunity to engage with literacy education with my practicum class, and to apply these strategies in the classroom.

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I have deferred my practicum but I am looking forward to meeting and interacting with my students when the time comes! One of the strategies I would like to implement to support ELL leaders is the idea of a dual language assignment! I love the thought of potentially doing a bilingual advertisement to attract visitors to a country or region. This gives students a perspective that English is an addition to their first language, rather than a replacement for it, and will help them be more confident in their English language learning journey.

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As a teacher candidate, I feel very fortunate that my undergraduate degree (Second Language Teaching: Teaching French as a Second Language) allowed me to hone my skills as a second language teacher. Although I was in the French stream (rather than the English stream), many second language teaching concepts are the same. Thus, when it comes time to address second language teaching in my classroom during my practicum or during the years to come, I feel like I am well prepared to effectively teach ELL and ELD students and address any all difficulties they have. Specifically, I like that Many Roots, Many Voices: Supporting English Language Learners in Every Classroom, encourages teachers to encourage the use (rather than prohibit the use) of a student’s second language. Too often, second language teachers “ban” the use of a student’s first language when, in fact, using a student’s first language can be an excellent way to both value a student’s background and effectively communicate content.

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For this response, I wanted to focus on the second document, Many Roots, Many Voices: Supporting English Language Learners in Every Classroom. Learning about the different approaches to facilitating an inclusive educational environment helped me understand the ways I can make my classroom more accessible to ESL and ELL students. The use of a dual language approach is something that I hope to integrate into my practicum or future position as an educator. I thought that the idea of providing dual language assignments was extremely interesting and could help with the integration of a student into what could be a drastically different learning environment. Providing the opportunity for learners to work in a mode where they feel most comfortable can build self-confidence and draw connections between past knowledge and new material.

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I consider myself very lucky because my background is in teaching ESL and my practicum is in a wonderful ELD class with some amazing students. ESL and ELD are my biggest passions.
These readings were so interesting because they are very related and meaningful to my practicum specifically and I do not really have to "reach" to find an idea I could use or even an idea that I had not already seen.
For the purpose of this response I have chosen to dive deeper and respond to the idea of "Demonstrate procedures and provide related hands-on activities." from page 59 of the Ministry Document. I have seen from experience that providing hands-on experiences that students can interact with is very very effective. My students in practicum right now are working on things like long vowel sounds and the floss rule and one thing my associate teacher does is have them watch videos where they are able to participate and shout out answers as the video plays. They really really enjoy this kind of thing and there is not one student who does not participate.
ELD students, like most students, do not respond well to just being talked at. They need stimulation and meaningful activities in order to stay engaged and actually learn content. As I go forward into the evaluated part of my practicum, I will make sure that all of my lesson plans include a lot of time for students to be hands-on with their learning.

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This past Wednesday was my first practicum day, where I was introduced to a grade 5-6 extended learning English as Second Language classroom. I will be teaching Language and Mathematics in the morning, and in the afternoon, I will be teaching Physical Education, Social Studies and Science. The Making Language and Content Accessible for English Language Learners document proposes many useful strategies to incorporate in the classroom. Notably, one of the strategies that stood out to me was the use of gestures for emphasis, raise pitch and volume slightly, repeat or rephrase method. I believe this method would allow for students to connect my physical movements to the words I’m saying. For example, last week we were talking about Monarchy’s, however the students didn’t really comprehend what it meant. Next week, if we are still talking about this subject, I could use my hands and arms to create a crown on my head to demonstrate that monarchy means King/Queen.

From the Welcome first languages in the classroom article, I believe I could incorporate this during my practicum. I noticed one student had a native language of French, I think that allowing the student to express themselves in their native tongue could facilitate the language barrier between French and English. Being a francophone, I could provide instructions in both English and French.

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I don't seem to have any English Language Learners in my practicum classes. I'm currently working in EFI classrooms (specifically in grade 8). Though I would love to use the create your own picture book concepts I've learned today. I don't know what my future will bring, but the students I'm working with now are very creative and do seem to like drawing and doodling (considering what I've been noticing when they're not paying attention to their lessons). As well, when I overlook their math work, it's creative and cleanly drawn. I do think that if I had them create their own picture books, many of the students would have fun with it.

Though as they're older, there is always the group who would think picture books are "for little kids". While I disagree, I could work with this and try to inspire them to do a comic instead. It still uses the concepts behind picture book making but I can always bring up my own love of comics and Japanese manga to entice the students.