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Punctuation Explained (by Punctuation!) | Scratch Garden

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From the earliest grades through college, ESL learners often find that education is a bit of struggle for them; fortunately, by developing effective ESL classroom activities for elementary school students, you can start them on a pathway to success early in their educational careers.

These little ones will be able to gain a firmer understanding of the English language earlier in their lives when ESL teaching strategies are implemented into the lesson plans. As a result, they can start to build their vocabulary, understand the direct and implied meanings of words, and create a content in which they can absorb new material.

Understanding Elementary School Needs

To develop effective ESL classroom activities for elementary school students, you need to understand what these learners need. Essentially, elementary school students are in search of:

A framework for understanding school and the learning experience

Lessons that make sense to them in the classroom and in real life

Caring teachers who are dedicated to the students' success

Experiences that enrich their understanding of reading, writing, mathematics, and other disciplines

While youngsters are certainly not thinking in these exact words, creating and approaching lessons with these goals in mind will help you to better speak to all students, especially ESL students.

Effective Teaching Strategies

No matter what type of activity the students are participating in, some specific strategies exist that make sense for ESL students in the elementary school setting.

Make your lessons short - Little ones simply do not have the attention span to sit for great lengths of time without a break. This is especially challenging for ESL students who do not understand all of the words being used in the lesson. They might not be concentrating on what you are saying now because they are still trying to process something that you said a few minutes ago.

Diversify the lesson - You might lecture for a bit, have them complete some busy work, and then break them up into pairs or groups.

Create an environment that builds confidence - Provide many opportunities for ESL students to be right with their responses.

Keep an open-mind - Understand how a different perspective on a subject might lead to an answer you weren't expecting. This does not mean the answer was wrong.

Ask questions - Give your students a chance to answer the questions which have been raised in earlier class sessions; this gives your ESL students a chance to recall the information.

Use visuals - When you show a diagram, photo, painting, or other visual, the ESL students are usually able to understand what you are saying or writing.

Ask students to draw pictures describing what they have just read in a book or sites that they saw on a recent trip.

Have them create a picture that demonstrates a scene from history.

Ask them to play a musical instrument.

Encourage them to share a science experiment in a classroom presentation.

Ideas for Elementary ESL Activities

Now that you have some general strategies for effective ESL teaching, you can start to design classroom activities to reinforce what you are teaching while you heighten your students' comfort with the English language.

Incorporate Other Disciplines

Reading and writing might be at the core of your lessons as an elementary school teacher, but bringing in other interest areas is important to reinforce their learning. It is particulary important for the ESL student, since activities can often give the student a chance to communicate without being afraid that they will use the wrong word.

For example:

Modify Activities for ESL Students

If you have both ESL students and native speaking students in your classroom, you can often plan the same activity for all students, just modifying the activity where necessary to make sure it is effective for your ESL students.

Let's say that you are asking students to write a story using 25 vocabulary words. It will probably take longer for an ESL student to complete this task, since they are not familiar with all the words. Instead, you might consider reducing the number of vocabulary words that your ESL students have to include.

Writing a series of sentences or a full paragraph or story can be daunting for the ESL student. If the same activity is given to native speakers in the classroom, the ESL student might be embarrassed if they take longer to complete their activity. An effective modification is to give the ESL student(s) a sentence, paragraph or story with words missing. Have them fill in the missing words using a word bank that you provide.

Develop Group Activities

Working with other students (either other ESL students or with native speaking students) in a non-competitive environment gives ESL learners the chance to see the strengths that they possess. They will learn that they have talents and skills to bring to the group that some of their peers may not have. This would be a real confidence-builder.

Drawing - Group murals give elementary students a fun way to express their feelings and show what they have learned.

Reading - Groups can be particularly effective in many ways, and one of them is when it comes to reading. Creating a group of ESL readers helps them to build confidence and to mingle with other ESL students who share their struggles.

Sample Lesson Plan

The ESL experts at YourDictionary have prepared a sample lesson plan for Characters and Their Character as a great example of a group reading activity. It is included as a printable .pdf file at the beginning of this article.

The elementary school years are definitely a sensitive time, so incorporating these techniques will help to increase a student's confidence and ability.

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esl activities for elementary school students

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Developing Effective ESL Classroom Activities for Elementary School Students

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From the earliest grades through college, ESL learners often find that education is a bit of struggle for them; fortunately, by developing effective ESL classroom activities for elementary school students, you can start them on a pathway to success early in their educational careers.

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Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing.

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CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.1.2.A
Capitalize dates and names of people.

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CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.1.2.B
Use end punctuation for sentences.

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Assessments, Homework, Videos, Games, Lesson Plans. Over a million items aligned to Common Core, PARCC, SBAC

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Teach, Assess, and Analyze with the largest K-12 Resource Library

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Practice sentences with students and allow them to identify errors of punctuation/capitalization in groups/partners.

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First Grade Activities to Teach Capitalization & Punctuation : Early Education

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Complete worksheet as a class.

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Students will accurately rewrite the sentences on the "Kitty Cat" worksheet, displaying the correct use of capitalization and punctuation.

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Fix the Sentences: Kitty Cat | Worksheet | Education.com

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This cat's a cutie, but her sentences are just a mess. Some of them are out of order, and some are missing things every sentence needs: capitalization and punctuation. When kids fix the problems, they are gaining valuable practice with written English language conventions such as sentence structure, capitalization, and punctuation.

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ESL intermediate writing exercises are some of the most difficult lessons to develop or to find already developed on the Internet. There is a wealth of pedagogy and instructional material available for the beginning ESL writing student, and the advanced student can typically be exposed to mainstreamed material. Exercises for the all-important middle ground, the intermediate ESL student, are not easy to find.

Without a well-conceived theory to take students from the basic level to the advanced level, many second language learners get trapped in a quagmire of not quite being fluent and not quite being beginners. This sort of linguistic purgatory is highly frustrating and can be avoided with the proper implementation of ESL intermediate writing exercises.

Finding ESL Intermediate Writing Exercises

Internet Resources

The Internet has long been a useful source for ESL instructional material, but the overwhelming amount of content that is available can make the act of getting to the good stuff tedious. This information below has been selected because of its usefulness with the ESL demographic that is not quite advanced, yet is past the stage of being a beginner.

A Guide to Learning English Writing Exercises - Hosted by the Frankfurt International School, this English learning resource offers many useful lesson ideas for ESL teachers looking for material for intermediate writers.

ESL Letter Writing Exercise - This article reflects one of the important philosophies of writing pedagogy that has gained popularity in recent years, which is that writing is learned more naturally if the goal is a practical one. If their writing has a real world purpose, students are able to better support their claims and to produce meaningful sentences. Letter writing can take the form of a personal letter, a letter to the editor of a newspaper or an email. Whichever way, this is one of many proven effective ESL intermediate writing exercises.

ESL Galaxy - This site has links and resources for intermediate ESL writers including exercises on seasons, weather, clothes, dining out, holidays, using the future tense, and many more.

Linguistic Funland - The links on this website provide a wide range of exercises for ESL instructors working with intermediate writers.

Print Resources

One factor to keep in mind when preparing lessons for intermediate writing students is that the resource need not be specifically geared for ESL students to be useful. The following texts are extremely well designed for intermediate writing instruction and can be tailored to meet the needs of your classroom's population.

Final Thoughts

Working to ensure fluency in language learners is a multi-staged process. Taking students from the most basic lessons to the advanced stage requires careful attention and a focused pedagogical philosophy. With the above resources and a thoughtful instructor, an ESL student will transition to the advanced stages of English proficiency in a natural and productive manner.

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ESL intermediate writing exercises are some of the most difficult lessons to develop or to find already developed on the Internet. There is a wealth of pedagogy and instructional material available for the beginning ESL writing student, and the advanced student can typically be exposed to mainstreamed material.

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There are many ESL classroom and cultural sensitivity issues that teachers must address to ensure they are delivering language instruction without prejudice, discrimination, or bias. By understanding the potential problems with cultural sensitivity, teachers can avoid creating an English-centric classroom while increasing their students' language skills.

Stereotypes and Cultural Bias

One of the biggest unintentional biases teachers of ESL students must face is the assumption that when a student does not understand the English language, they must automatically not understand the classroom material being delivered in that language. This myth can lead to high achieving students being deemed lazy, unmotivated, and unintelligent.

In many non-English speaking cultures, students are brought up with more passive behaviors when interacting with adults. An ESL student may be less willing to approach a teacher for extra help or tutoring. This can lead to a cultural bias and assumptions that non-English speaking students are less intelligent than their native English speaking peers.

At the same time, non-English speaking students can quickly absorb cultural biases against English speakers as they witness a more driven, ambitious educational community than they may be accustomed to. This may lead students to be even more reserved, hampering their language skills even further as they refrain from asking for assistance when needed.

A well balanced ESL curriculum will help both students and teachers overcome preconceived notions about different cultures to create a learning environment where all students are valued for their unique heritages.

Many Students, Many Nations

One of the biggest problems ESL teachers face is that one ESL classroom may be filled with students from many nations, even if, for example, they are all Spanish-speaking countries. The cultures of Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Columbia, and Mexico are vastly different, and teachers should not assume that students who share a common native language will share similar cultural backgrounds. Even students from different regions of the same country will have different cultural beliefs and traditions that should be honored and preserved.

Classroom Appearances

The first step toward ESL classroom and cultural sensitivity agreements is to create a learning environment that recognizes students' different cultures in a meaningful way.

Classroom rules should be posted in all appropriate languages.

Decorations such as country maps, flags, and pictures of prominent leaders can bring a taste of each nation into the ESL classroom in a positive way.

Students should be encouraged to work with others from different cultures. Savvy teachers can arrange group projects designed to encourage students to share and explore one another's cultures.

Sharing Cultures

The best way to practice cultural sensitivity in an ESL classroom is to encourage cultural awareness by exploring and sharing each student's unique culture and heritage. This can be done in several ways, such as:

Autobiographical writing assignments

Oral presentations on students' native countries

Participating in a school talent show to showcase culturally unique skills

Comparing and contrasting holidays in different countries, perhaps through classroom or school-wide celebrations

Organizing ESL students to provide peer tutoring to other students studying their native languages

Discussing current events from a multicultural viewpoint

Organizing a cultural bazaar to share ESL students' cultures with the larger school community

While each project will require students to reinforce and practice their English language skills, they will also get a comforting taste of home as they share their background with their peers.

Encouraging Bicultural Students

While the ultimate goal of an ESL classroom is to create bilingual students, an additional goal should be to create bicultural students. To do this, teachers should not only practice cultural sensitivity toward their students' native countries, but also encourage students to learn about their new culture. Activities to promote bicultural awareness can include:

Taking polls of regular students' traditions and beliefs

Visiting regional attractions such as museums, art exhibits, and historical sites to gain an appreciation of local culture

Encouraging question and answer sessions about the new culture while comparing it to students' native cultures, such as discussing popular television shows, slang, or other lifestyle characteristics

As students learn to compare their old culture with their new culture, they can gain an appreciation of both without minimizing or denigrating either culture.

Importance of Biculturalism

The goal of ESL classroom and cultural sensitivity practices should be to impress upon students the value of embracing and understanding their new culture while still celebrating their old cultures. Inviting guest speakers who have successfully integrated into the new culture but who are still active with their native culture can demonstrate that embracing two cultures is possible and can lead to a richer life filled with more treasured cultural experiences than a single culture could produce.

Teachers who are sensitive to their students' unique cultures will be able to relate to the students more easily, leading to more successful instruction and more fulfilled students willing to embrace both a new language and a new culture.

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There are many ESL classroom and cultural sensitivity issues that teachers must address to ensure they are delivering language instruction without prejudice, discrimination, or bias. By understanding the potential problems with cultural sensitivity, teachers can avoid creating an English-centric classroom while increasing their students' language skills.

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Sentence Features (Capitalization) | Worksheet | Education.com

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Something isn't right about these sentences-they're missing correct capitalization! Use this activity to assess your students' abilities to capitalize sentences.

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Distribute worksheets amongst partners.

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Grade 1 capitalization worksheets will cover the rules for capitalizing names of people and places, the first word of a sentence, the pronoun "I", the days and months of the year, and titles of movies, books, and television shows.

Grade 1 Capitalization Worksheets

Following are two grade 1 capitalization worksheets that will give the students practice in capitalization. The students will recognize words that need a capital and rewrite sentences using proper capitalization.

Worksheet #1

Capital letters are needed for the names of people and places. Sentences always start with a capital letter.

EXAMPLE: Tony took Mary to New York.

A: INSTRUCTIONS: Circle the word that needs a capital letter. Hint: there are 15.

B: INSTRUCTIONS: Write the sentences with the correct capitalization. Hint: There are 15.

Answers

Answers to A:

Answers to B

The next of the grade 1 capitalization worksheets cover the rules of capitalization for the pronoun "I", days and months of the year, and titles of books, movies, and television shows. It will also review the rules for the names of people and places, as well as for the beginning of a sentence.

Worksheet #2

Whenever you refer to yourself, you use the letter "I" and it is always capitalized. Days and months are always capitalized. Titles of movies, books, and television shows are also capitalized. Usually, you do not capitalize small words in titles, like a, an, and, or the.

EXAMPLE: On Tuesday, I saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

A. INSTRUCTIONS: Put an X next to the sentence that does not have the correct capitalization.

1. _____ Last week, i watched Spongebob.

2. _____ Do you like Where the Wild Things Are?

3. _____ Every friday, we get pizza.

4. _____ my favorite month is july.

5. _____ Susan loves to swim on saturday.

6. _____ She and I went to see Avatar.

7. _____ School starts in August.

8. _____ henry hates watching sesame Street.

9. _____ Ice cream is my favorite Food.

10. _____ How is the Weather outside?

B. INSTRUCTIONS: In the following paragraph, circle the words that should be capitalized. There are 25.

there are so many things i love to do. i love going to the movie theater called hollywood cinema. my friend sam went with me last sunday. we watched toy story. then i took him to kentucky fried chicken. in december, i love to ice skate at glacier park. mostly, i like to play mario brothers.

Answers

A.

1. __X__ Last week, i watched Spongebob.

2. _____ Do you like Where the Wild Things Are?

3. __X__ Every friday, we get pizza.

4. __X__ my favorite month is july.

5. __X__ Susan loves to swim on saturday.

6. _____ She and I went to see Avatar.

7. _____ School starts in August.

8. __X__ henry hates watching sesame Street.

9. __X__ Ice cream is my favorite Food.

10. __X__ How is the Weather outside?

B.

There are so many things I love to do. I love going to the movie theater called Hollywood Cinema. My friend Sam went with me last Sunday. We watched Toy Story. Then I took him to Kentucky Fried Chicken. In December, I love to ice skate at Glacier Park. Mostly, I like to play Mario Brothers.

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Grade 1 capitalization worksheets will cover the rules for capitalizing names of people and places, the first word of a sentence, the pronoun "I", the days and months of the year, and titles of movies, books, and television shows. Following are two grade 1 capitalization worksheets that will give the students practice in capitalization.

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"The meaning of even a single word is rather more complex than one might imagine."

- Editors of the American Heritage Dictionary, 1980, p. viii

"Teacher, do we need our pencils today?" my Puerto Rican elementary students would urgently ask when I came to their classroom to escort them to my English as a Second Language classroom. I was a student teacher in a Massachusetts elementary school, and it took me awhile to figure out the correlation between the pencil and hallway behavior. If I replied, "Yes, you should bring a pencil," the walk to my classroom took 15 minutes and involved a lot of disruptions, student squabbles, drifting students and other various misbehaviors. As a student teacher, I was very focused on keeping order and creating a challenging learning environment. If I replied, "No, you don't need a pencil today," the walk to my classroom took about five minutes, even with a stop at the drinking fountain.

So, what was the correlation? Writing. The students knew that if they had to bring a pencil they would have to do writing in the class, and they dreaded it. If they didn't need a pencil, we would be working on projects or doing more verbal work, and they liked that. What they weren't expecting was that half-way through my student teaching, I bought 10 boxes of pencils and kept them in my classroom, so they never had to bring a pencil to class - I had plenty to go around. This improved the hallway behavior, but still left me with the question of how to improve ESL student writing when they were frustrated by the practice and went to great lengths to avoid it.

I have been teaching ESL for many years and there is no perfect solution to this problem; however, I do believe I have added quite a few writing activities to my bag of tricks and improved my ability to differentiate writing tasks based on student ability. As I improved my ability to ensure that each student would be successful in the writing activity, their confidence increased, and they were less likely to engage in disruptive behavior. You know what I'm talking about - the long, dramatic search for a pencilâ€¦ and then paperâ€¦ or the meandering walk about the room to get yesterday's writing draft, or the ever popular, "15 minute pencil sharpening" session. I hope some of the writing activities I share with you will help you to reduce anxiety in your ESL students and increase their language and writing skills.

There is a very important correlation between writing and language development. As students develop language skills, they often develop listening skills first (lots of input they can understand), then speaking (they begin to formulate their ideas in the second language), then reading (they can understand the sound/symbol correspondence of the new language and make sense of the words) and finally writing (they have enough language to express their own ideas in writing). This is not true for 100% of language learners, but it is true for the majority of them. Why is writing often the last skill to emerge? It almost seems that reading would be more difficult because the student needs to sound out words and understand the author's message. It would seem writing might be easier because students are sharing their own ideas already in their heads and simply putting them on paper. However, writing requires a lot more processing of language in order to produce a message.

First the student must have an idea, then think of the appropriate way to say it, then start to write it and spell it correctly, and then create another sentence to continue to communicate the idea. If we add the students' worry that they are making huge, embarrassing errors or that their ideas aren't very good in the first place, then we begin to understand the complexity involved in writing in a second language. In fact, the way we communicate, or the way students put their ideas on paper, is largely influenced by their culture. In some of my classes, my Asian students were very confused when I told them to revise their writing because this was a "first draft." In their experience they had always written an item once and submitted it as "the final," and then the teacher would correct it. The idea that they had to write it over again didn't make sense to them. Students from other cultures may have developed a storytelling style that involves laying out a lot of background information and detail and takes quite a while to get to the point. In most western writing, we expect a topic sentence or a lead paragraph that will tell us what the point is, and then everything written after that leads to a direct conclusion. Many of my students had great difficulty connecting their ideas this way.

With that said, teachers have a big task in improving ESL student writing skills, but the payoff for instructional dedication can be great. A researcher on adolescent literacy at the University of Minnesota, David O'Brien, did a study on improving the reading skills of adolescent students. All of the students were involved in a six week study and during that time they were responsible for creating brochures and other types of communication on computers. They had criteria to input a certain amount of text and graphics to create a final project. This required lots of thought and revisions to achieve the final result. At the end of the six weeks the students took a reading test and the majority of them had improved their reading skills significantly. This was a very interesting result, considering that the teachers had not focused on teaching reading skills. The conclusion was that students used meta-cognition to process language and work with it in a more meaningful way, so that consequently their reading skills improved even though they were mostly working on writing.

Additional positive academic results have been seen in the "90 90 90 Schools." These are schools that researchers have identified as 90% poverty, 90% students of color and 90% achieving standards. This is a most remarkable combination in the educational world. The researchers examined these schools and found one common denominator among them - they all focused on developing writing skills. Each school had an agreed upon writing curriculum and methodology that was used at all grade levels, and student writing was prominently displayed throughout the building and in classrooms. Students used writing in all content areas to demonstrate academic concepts learned. In the end, 90% of the students in these schools were able to pass state grade-level tests based on the academic standards.

Now that I have hopefully convinced you that all your hard work will pay off, I would like to introduce some effective writing activities. I would like to acknowledge that there are many types of effective writing instruction used in classrooms today, including process writing, graphic organizers as writing planning tools, vocabulary stretchers, etcâ€¦ and all of those are beneficial to ELL students. For the purpose of this article, I will focus on a few writing activities that I think are particularly useful when working with students with a wide-range of English language skills.

How to differentiate writing activities:

With some pre-planning, a teacher can create a writing assignment that will allow every student to be successful. For example, the teacher may give a writing assignment that has A, B and C levels (or they can be number or color-coded).

ELL students at Level A copy a sentence or short passage exactly as it is written. This helps beginning-level students who are not very familiar with the language, but may be able to interpret some of the information as they copy it.

Level B students receive a paragraph or two that has blank spaces in the text. The students write the word or phrase that completes the sentence. This allows the student to write an amount that is not overwhelming and helps them comprehend the information.

Level C students write on their own, but perhaps they receive paragraph prompts or are allowed to look in a book, but must put the idea in their own words. After some practice with this system and getting to know your students' English language skills, you will be able to create a system that works best for your class.

Language Experience Approach

The Language Experience Approach draws on instructional techniques used with younger children who have not yet developed literacy skills. In this approach, the teacher presents information to the students, or they have an "experience" of some sort - for example, a field trip, or acting out a scene in a book. Then the students tell the teacher what to write on the board to explain the experience. This may be useful as an activity for a volunteer or teacher's aide to use with a small group of ESL students during literacy time. Here are the steps.

1. Experience something - for example, the students have listened to the story, "The Little Red Hen" and then acted it out.

2. The teacher stands by the board or a large sheet of paper and says to the students, "Tell me the story of the Little Red Hen."

3. As each student tells a part of the story, the teacher writes it down on the board, just as it was stated. For example, a student might say, "The Little Red Hen work so hard and nobody want help her." This continues until each student has spoken or the story is finished.

4. Then the teacher tells the students, "Let's read the story together and listen to see if the story makes sense and if there is anything we want to change."

5. After reading the story, the teacher asks students if they want to change anything. For example, one student may raise her hand and say, "I think it should say, "worked" not "work." The teacher may ask other students if they agree or disagree.

6. If the suggested change is correct, the teacher offers praise and moves on to the next suggestion. If the suggested change is not correct, the teacher should help the student analyze the suggested change. For example, if the student says, "I think it should say, â€˜The Little Red Hen she worked so hardâ€¦." The teacher would ask if others agree and see if there is discussion, then the teacher could point out that the Little Red Hen is the pronoun or "name," so in English we don't need to put it in twice. We can say "She worked so hard." Or "The Little Red Hen worked so hard."

7. When students have analyzed and corrected the whole text, the teacher may either circle a few more spots where students missed corrections and they can be challenged to figure out what the change should be, or the students can be instructed to copy the text with the corrections included.

8. As a final activity, students are instructed to take the story home and read it to three people and bring it back with signatures.

After this activity, usually even beginning-level ELL students are able to read the story to others because it was their experience, it is in their own words, and they have worked with the text in a meaningful way.

Sentence Auction

This activity helps students analyze common writing errors through a personalized activity since they are trying to buy their own sentences. Once a week or once a month, a teacher can hold a "Sentence Auction." The teacher takes sentence examples from student writing - some of which have errors and some that don't, and writes them on a handout or overhead projector. The identity of the student who wrote each sentence is not revealed. To begin the sentence auction, each student is given an "account" of perhaps $300. The students are told to "bid" on the good sentences. The winner is the student with the highest number of "good" sentences.

1. The teacher takes on the persona of an "Auctioneer" and opens the bidding at $10.

2. The teacher reads out the sentence confidently exactly as it is written. "Him want to go to school very bad." Who will give me $10?"

3. The students take turns bidding until the teacher decides who has "won" the bid.

4. Some sentences will not sell because students will know they are "bad." Just leave those sentences and move to the next one.

5. After all the sentences have been sold, the teacher goes through the list and the students say whether the sentence was good or bad. If they agree that it was a bad sentence, then the teacher asks them to explain how they can make it a "good" sentence.

6. Finally the students can count how many "good" sentences they have (since they may have bought some bad ones) and a winner is declared.

7. The teacher may want to give a little prize or certificate to the student. In a variation of this activity students can work in pairs or groups to buy the sentences.

Error correction

I have never "corrected" my students' writing mistakes, at least not in the traditional way. I have always told my students, "If I correct your English, I improve my English; if you correct your English, you improve yours." I handled corrections in one of two ways: either I identified what errors I would be looking for in the writing submission or I told them I would only circle five errors in the whole paper. If I pre-set the errors I would look for, for example correct use of past tense, I would only correct past tense errors, even if I saw other glaring errors in the paper. Sometimes this was hard to do, but I wanted to maintain the students' focus on the writing improvement we were working on. If I set a number of errors I would circle, for example, five, then I carefully chose those five and ignored the rest. When I returned the papers, the students were responsible for correcting their own mistakes. If they weren't sure how to do it, they could check with a classmate, and if no one knew, then I would assist. Invariably the students would ask, "Are these the only errors in the paper?" and I would tell them no. They might be disappointed, but they came to understand the value of correcting their own errors when they submitted a piece of writing.

Quick Write

One of the challenges for ELL students when they approach writing is their anxiety about writing their ideas correctly and writing a lot of information in English. This may feel overwhelming when a student is assigned an essay. In order to get students comfortable with the idea of just putting ideas on paper and not worrying about mistakes, we do regular "quick writes." For "quick writes" I give the students a topic and then tell them to write as much as they can for five minutes. They need to keep their pencils on the paper and even if they can't think of anything to write or they are worried about how to spell things, they are supposed to keep writing. At the end of five minutes, the students count how many words they were able to write and they keep track in a log. The objective is that they will see progress in the amount of writing they are able to do in five minutes' time and hopefully apply this fluency to their essay writing.

Cinquain poems

Cinquain poems offer great flexibility in working with ELL students of a variety of language levels. The basic Cinquain formula is as follows, but teachers can modify it as needed according to the student language level.

One noun
Two adjectives
Three gerunds (words + ing)
A short sentence.
A one-word summary
An example of a Cinquain a student might write:
Home
Warm, happy
Loving, welcoming, helping
People you love.
Family

There really is no wrong way to do a Cinquain, students can put key vocabulary words together any way they like to create the message they desire. Teachers may want to use Cinquains to reinforce new content vocabulary and concepts as well.

With these writing activities to try in your classroom, the only thing left is to buy a few boxes of pencils, hand them out to your ELL students and help them discover the possibility of joy in writing. Teachers who use a variety of activities and strategies to help ELL students become comfortable with expressing their ideas in a new language and finding success with small writing tasks, will give their students' confidence for a lifetime of self-expression. I offer this Cinquain poem to sum it up.

Writing
Fun, creative
Thinking, sharing, revising
Lots of ideas.
Proud
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This article from the National Center for Learning Disabilities, featured on LD OnLine, discusses dysgraphia and its warning signs, as well as strategies for addressing it for different age groups.
Reading Rockets: Writing Webcast
Reading Rockets webcast featuring Dr. Steven Graham, Dr. Louisa Moats, and Dr. Susan Neuman. These three renowned reading and writing experts address why writing is important, what the latest research tells us, and what educators and parents can do to support our children's development as writers.
Reading Rockets: Teaching Plot Structure with Picture Books
Use picture books to teach young writers how to organize plot logically. This article includes examples of basic plot structures, along with picture books that use those structures.
Reading Rockets: An Introduction to Letter Writing
This article from My Child Magazine, featured on Reading Rockets, offers samples of different styles of letters (from thank-you notes to letters to Santa) and style guidelines that children can follow.
ESL Writing Wizard: Handwriting Practice
This site lets you create your own handouts of words that students can practice writing. The paper is lined and the word is outlined in small dot print. Good for ELL students developing initial literacy skills.
ReadWriteThink: Comic Creator
ReadWriteThink offers a variety of fun, interactive writing activities, including the Comic Creator. Students can fill in comics with their own words and storylines.
PIZZAZ: Cinquain poems
A poetry site designed to assist instruction of ESL students in poetry and other creative writing forms. The site has links and detailed information on poetry such as Cinquain, Diamante, Haiku and Limericks. It also has further information on other types of creative writing and tips for instruction.
TeacherVision: Language Arts Graphic Organizers
These graphic organizers can be used to prepare for a five-paragraph essay, organize sentences in a paragraph, map concepts and events, compare topics with a Venn Diagram, organize notes for a presentation, create a double-entry journal, and much more.

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Improving Writing Skills: ELLs and the Joy of Writing

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"The meaning of even a single word is rather more complex than one might imagine." - Editors of the American Heritage Dictionary, 1980, p. viii "Teacher, do we need our pencils today?" my Puerto Rican elementary students would urgently ask when I came to their classroom to escort them to my English as a Second Language classroom.

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5-Step Procedure for How to Intervene or Reteach | Scholastic

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Guidelines for effective intervention based on assessment.

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How to Use Non-Examples/Misconceptions in Reteaching

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How to Use Non-Examples/Misconceptions in Reteaching

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Have you ever taught something to your students and then one hour or maybe even ten minutes later, they've seemed to forgotten everything?

When I first started teaching, this happened to me often. I couldn't figure out how to make the material I taught stick until I discovered something revolutionary-the non-example. Essentially I was helping my students learn more effectively by showing them the misconceptions that they could potentially come across.

However, rather than only show the misconception by itself, I also immediately provided a strategy afterward that could help them fix that misconception. Let's look at an example with the following concept-capitalizing the name of a holiday.

This is what I would say to my students during a reteach lesson where I'm reteaching the content again because they didn't understand the first time around. But this time I'm going to include my non-example/misconception immediately followed by the strategy:
"All right class, today we're going to review how to capitalize holidays since I noticed some of us were still forgetting to capitalize every part of the holiday. Let's look at how a student wrote this holiday. They put "christmas eve." Hmm is that correct? I don't think so because I know the first letter in a holiday needs to be capitalized so I'm going to change it and make it "Christmas eve." Awesome, now my holiday is correctly capitalized!!"
End scene. See what I did? I just told my students the misconception that many of them would have fallen for. And some of them might think that's actually how you write Christmas Eve, but there will always be a small group of students who notice that the teacher has made a mistake, and these students love to correct the teacher. In this case, my 2nd graders would say "Miss, that's not correct! You have to capitalize "eve" also!"

And that's when I feign shock and come up with my best acting. "Oh my goodness, silly me! That's right. Whenever I capitalize a holiday, I need to capitalize every part. Not just the first word! Let me fix that." Suddenly for the students who didn't understand how to capitalize holidays, they now have a sticky moment in their mind when their teacher made a mistake and fixed it thanks to the help of their fellow classmates.

Because of this way of teaching, my students know I make mistakes quite often. But what actually ends up happening is now they are more alert during lessons! It's a game to them where they want to be the one that catches the teacher's mistake, and we get a good laugh from it. More importantly, it shows them that making a mistake is not the end of the world. There is always a strategy to fix it.

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Have you ever taught something to your students and then one hour or maybe even ten minutes later, they've seemed to forgotten everything? When I first started teaching, this happened to me often. I couldn't figure out how to make the material I taught stick until I discovered something revolutionary-the non-example.

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Why do we need them?

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Three-Minute Video Explaining the Common Core State Standards

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Teach your child how to read/write: Punctuation

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Game: Matching Upper and Lowers Case Letters

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Game: Matching Upper and Lowers Case Letters

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ABCya! * Uppercase and Lowercase Letter Matching for Kids