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In grade K-2, a while a teacher is reading a story aloud students can act out motions or sounds, this helps students build their comprehension, have better phonemic awareness, enhanced memory, and helps to build a love of reading.

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Reading Aloud Together, Across the Grade Levels

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When teachers read out loud to students, modeling the skills of good reading, it improves kids’ reading mastery.

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For grades K-2 having classrooms jobs at a younger age helps to promote ownership, motivation, and positive peer interaction.

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Building Responsibility: How Classroom Jobs Help Students Grow - TeachHUB

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Have you ever seen a student beam with pride while passing out papers or when you ask them to be a line leader? That’s because classroom jobs matter. They aren’t just to keep kids busy or your classroom running smoothly – though that definitely helps. These jobs build a classroom community where students learn to…

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A smile from a positive influence in your life can change your day right around. In grade K-2 and 3-5, building a simple positive interaction with students builds a strong relationship and increases a sense of belonging and sets a positive tone for the day.

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Pronunciation Guides Special Populations and Settings
Allday, A., Bush, M., Ticknor, N. & Walker, L. (2011). Using teacher greetings to increase speed to task engagement. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. 44 (393-396)

Allday, A. R. & Pakurar, K. (2007). Effects of teacher greetings on student on-task behavior. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. 40, 317-320

Alrubail, R. (2014). Empathy & Inclusion for ELL Students. Edutopia. Retrieved from: http://www.edutopia.org/discussion/empathy-inclusion-ell-students

Dubois, C. & Losoff, R. (n.d). Safe School Environments for Transgender Students. National Association of School Psychologists. Retrieved from: https://www.nasponline.org/publications/periodicals/communique/issues/volume-44-issue-1/safe-school-environments-for-transgender-students

Lev, A. I. & Alie,L. (2012). Transgender and gender noncomforming children and youth. Improving Emotional & Behavioral Outcomes for LGBT Youth a Guide for Professionals. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.

Weinstein, L., Laverghetta, A., Laverghetta, A., Ralph, A., & Stewart, M. (2009). Teacher greetings increase college student's test scores. College Student Journal. 43(2)

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In your opinion, how does greeting a student by name impact a learning environment?

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Shares how personal greetings can play an important role in creating a positive learning climate.

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In grades 3-5 and 6-8, think-pair-share helps students have peer discussion and be active participants in discussions. This strategy also helps increase engagement and fosters collaboration.

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Visual Aids: Visual aids such as pictures, charts, and graphic organizers help ELL students connect new vocabulary and concepts to concrete images. They make abstract ideas more accessible and support comprehension across all subjects.

Sentence Frames: Sentence frames provide structured language support, giving ELL students a starting point to express their ideas. This build confidence, encourages participation, and helps students practice academic language in a meaningful way.

These two strategies can be used across all grade levels to support students with diverse learning needs.

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English Language Learners

Simple strategies-like providing visual cues-that teachers can use to help English learners improve their understanding in any class.

When facing challenges working with English learners (ELs), start with an empathetic approach. These students often feel overlooked, left out, and confused in school situations. Body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice can let them know that you care. Creating a welcoming environment provides a foundation for learning, and the once you've established that environment, you can support these students in their language acquisition with a few simple strategies.

4 Strategies for Supporting English Learners

1. A picture is worth a thousand words: A picture is understandable in any language. For English learners who may not comprehend everything a teacher says, an image will help clarify meaning and encourage understanding.

Whenever you introduce new vocabulary, couple a picture with each important word. For example, when I taught Romeo and Juliet, I gave my ELs a handout of five to six vocabulary words they would encounter in each scene we were studying. The handout had the word in English, a picture, and a place for students to write the translation of the word in their own language. I also projected the words and pictures on the board and explained each one. After we read the scene, I posted printouts of each word with its picture and added them to a word wall.

Long or dense texts may be overwhelming to ELs. Including images can boost comprehension and stamina. Consider adding images to assessments or any printed directions for activities.

2. Check for comprehension frequently: Often ELs will not tell you when they don't understand something because they don't want their classmates to know. Using quick formative assessments can help determine where more instruction is needed.

Turn and Talk is a useful strategy because it reduces the anxiety that ELs often feel when asked to speak in front of the entire class. Turn and Talk may be modified for ELs by providing a sentence starter or asking them to write down their answer before sharing it with a friend. Observing students during a Turn and Talk activity is useful for evaluating student understanding.

Exit tickets are short written activities usually given at the end of a lesson to check student comprehension. Including a sentence starter or picture support on an exit ticket is an easy way to scaffold learning for ELs.

In assessing student comprehension, it's important to check in frequently. After giving directions for an activity, check in with ELs and restate the expectations if needed. Model the task if it appears the directions were not sufficient. Checking for comprehension and providing clarification provides repeated language practice for students who are still developing proficiency with English.

3. Use sentence and paragraph frames: Many ELs in my classroom, especially less proficient learners, are shy about speaking in front of the class. In addition, they struggle to form grammatically correct responses to questions. To address this, I provide sentence frames during class discussion.

For example, if students are asked to give evidence, you can use the sentence frame "I know this because the text says _____."

If you want students to talk about causes of a historical event, a sentence frame could be:
"One cause of (the event) is _____" or (Event) happened because _____."

Sentence frames can also be helpful in writing activities. English learners often find writing activities daunting because of the high linguistic expectations of academic writing. Providing a syntactical model may lower anxiety.

For example, if you're asking your students to compare and contrast two characters or events, you might use a paragraph frame like this one:

I recently used a paragraph frame of cause-and-effect with fifth-grade ELs. Students had to use the signal words to infer whether to write a cause or an effect. We underlined signal words as a scaffold, but students needed to correctly identify causes and effects of a destroyed house. For students who can't write a cause-and-effect paragraph independently, this paragraph frame gave them the support they needed to communicate causes and effects.

4. Chunk texts: Reading academic texts is a challenge for ELs because of the complex academic vocabulary, complicated syntax, and density of text. One strategy is to chunk passages into short, manageable sections.

For each passage, choose two to three key vocabulary words and provide pictures of those items. Allow ELs to translate the words into their native language if they're unfamiliar with the terms. After each chunk of text, ask ELs to write a one-sentence summary of the section using the vocabulary words in their sentence. Then move on to the next section of text.

When I taught Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech to high school ELs, they found it challenging. I broke up the speech into five sections, and we spent one class period on each section, focusing on vocabulary and message. Each day, we worked together to find the most important quote from that section, rewrote the quote in simpler language, and illustrated it.

After five days, I gave the students a card sort with our five quotes, five paraphrased quotes, and five images and asked them to match the items. Then they had to write a summary of the entire speech. Breaking down the larger text made it easier for the ELs to build content knowledge.

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4 Simple Ways to Support English Learners' Comprehension

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Simple strategies-like providing visual cues-that teachers can use to help English learners improve their understanding in any class.

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Choice Boards (with assistive tech option)

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Choice Boards (with assistive tech option)

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Choice boards give students with disabilities opportunities to select learning activities that match their strengths, needs, and interests. This promotes independence increases motivation, and provides accessible options for demonstrating understanding. By offering flexibility, choice boards help ensure all students can engage meaningfully with the context.

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Choice Boards: Benefits, Design Tips & Differentiation - Dr. Catlin Tucker

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Student agency, or a students’ ability to make key decisions about their learning experience, is an essential aspect of blended learning. Student agency requires that we design our lessons to offer students meaningful choices. These choices can help us universally design learning experiences that strive to remove barriers and invite students to decide how to […]

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Gamification uses game-like elements such as points, badges, or levels to make learning more fun and motivating. It encourages healthy competition, builds persistence, and helps students celebrate progress along the way. This strategy works well across grade levels to keep students engaged and focused on learning goals. This strategy can be utilized for grade 3-5 and 6-8.

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5 Benefits of Gamification

Dmitri Mendeleev was a Russian scientist and educator in the 19th century who is often credited as the scientist that first published the Periodic Table of Elements. However, what people do not know is that he may have been one of the first scientists to use gamification to complete an educational task.

Dmitri Mendeleev

The term gamification can be used in two ways. The first way is by adopting the act of playing a video game into everyday use. The engagement levels and entertainment values of video gaming can motivate users to accomplish tasks that are normally viewed as boring, such as learning. Another definition of gamification is the act of using game elements to make non-games more enjoyable. 1

Mendeleev was known to have been an avid card player, so it was logical for him to use cards as a way to categorize the elements in a way he could understand. Mendeleev turned the classification process into a card game by listing each element and other information on a card and placing them face up on a table. By doing this, he was able to have a better grasp on the relationship of each element. Mendeleev published his findings, which led scientists to discover new elements to fill in the gaps of Mendeleev's work as well as further developing the table.

Growing up, Mendeleev was not the most successful student, but he became a historical scientific figure because of gamification. This proves as an exemplary example of the benefits of gamification and the impact it can have on all students despite their prior academic achievement.
Here are a few of the benefits of gamification: Gamification aids in cognitive development in adolescents.
Using gamification to aid in cognitive development will allow an increase in the activity of the regions of the brain to allow for adequate development. Games that are produced specifically for enhancing cognitive development are often referred to as "brain games." Brain games have become increasingly popular and are based on various questions and problems that the user has to answer or solve. Brain games can improve the rate in which the brain processes and maintains information. 2
In some cases, it aids in physical development.
Exercising with an interactive game is just as effective as normal exercise. This form of exercise will be very beneficial in adolescents that enjoy playing video games but are not currently physically active. There are many long-term benefits to being active.
Gamification increases level of engagement in classrooms.
Scientists performed a study to measure the level of engagement students displayed when utilizing gamification in the classroom.3 The researchers assigned a point system to various daily class activities. Then the students were measured based on their level of engagement. The researchers found that the game-like atmosphere was favorable in the classroom and increased productivity.
Gamification aids in accessibility in the classroom.
Gamification can be used as a teaching tool to educate adolescents of all needs. Scientists studied the effectiveness of using gamification in the form of a video game to teach students diagnosed with autism.4 The results of this study showed that this training package was effective in teaching age-appropriate content through gamification.
Gamification isn't limited to the classroom.
Gamification is not limited to the classroom but can be used in learning outside the classroom. Perhaps you break up your child's math homework into sections. The child will then level up after completing each section to get hints that will solve a riddle. Or maybe you can have your child create their very own Periodic Table with a few elements just like Mendeleev did with cards. Gamification at home is also a good way to get involved in your child's education!
Students participating in gamification in the classroom.
As gamification becomes more of a buzzword, it is important to not write it off. There are many benefits to gamification that help in enhancing the learning process for students at all academic levels. Hopefully, one day the term gamification will no longer be a buzzword and will be a ubiquitous term used in classrooms. After all, gamification has been around for over a century--Mendeleev is proof.
References

1.) Deterding, S., Dixon, D., Khaled, R., & Nacke, L. (2011). From game design elements to gamefulness: defining "gamification". Proceedings of the MindTrek '11. doi:10.1145/2181037.2181040

2.) Doraiswamy, P. M., Agronin, M. (2009). Brain games: do they really work? http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=brain-games...

3.) Bustard, D. W., Black, M. M., Charles, T., Moore, A. A., McKinney, M. E. T., Moffett, P. (2011). GEL: A generic tool for game-enhanced learning. Unpublished research, University of Ulster, Coleraine, United Kingdom.

4.) Blum-Dimaya, A., Reeve, S. A., Reeve, K. F. (2010). Teaching children with autism to play a video game using activity schedules and game embedded simultaneous video modeling. Education and Treatment of Children, 33 (3). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/education_and_treatment_of_chil...

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Dmitri Mendeleev was a Russian scientist and educator in the 19th century who is often credited as the scientist that first published the Periodic Table of Elements. However, what people do not know is that he may have been one of the first scientists to use gamification to complete an educational task.

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In grades 6-8, virtual exit tickets allow students to reflect on their learning at the end of a lesson and give teachers quick feedback on their understandings. They encourage student voice, promote accountability, and help guide future instruction. Digital tools make them easy to implement and engaging for all learners.

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Iteratively-Designed Exit Tickets Enhances Student Learning

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What strategies can instructors use to simultaneously scaffold learning and promote reflective practice when assessing learning? This article describes one instructional team’s experience with desi…