Summer Learning Loss and Parent Outreach

Working with English Language Learners has its challenges and like any student, the summer months can be a set back.  English Learners spend most of their summer recess speaking their first langauge at home and many times travel home to their native country to visit family and friends.  While I encourage students to keep their first langauge and continue practicing, it is also important to continue practicing Englsih too.

While working with some parents, it dawned on me.  One way to help prevent major summer learning loss is to help the parents by providing them with the tools and resources necessary to continue practicing Englsih in the home.  Recently my district purchased a handful of Rosetta Stone subscriptions for our immigrant students to use and over the summer they would just sit and not be used.  Why not give these subscriptions to the parents and allow them the opportunity to learn Englsih at home!  

That was it...I would call this parent outreach...Summer Learning Loss.  But it gets even better than that....I had a large amount of money to spend from our federal immigrant grant funds.  How can I spend the money effectively and make sure it is being put to good use?  After brainstorming, I logged onto Lakeshore Learning and puchased English Language Learner games and resources to share with our newcomer students learning Englsih. I created backpacks that students were given to take home and practice learning English over the summer.  These were assigned to families and will be collected in the fall.  

To make this all happen, I set up an evening to host the event.  Parents and students attended for an hour.  We enjoyed some Jimmy John Subs and learned how to log into Rosetta Stone and use the program at home.  Towards the end, I shared the backpacks with the parents and had them sign out the materials.  

My hope is this promotes learning English at home during the summer and students will return in the fall well practiced and better equipped to start school.  

New ELD Resource

As an ELD (English Language Development) teacher I am always looking for resources. While sitting in a meeting I was introduced to this new website created by the US Department of Education.  Check it out! It's still in the works but it appears to be a great tool.

http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oela/english-learner-toolkit/index.html

Utilizing our Community Resources: The Public Library

The public library in Troy where I work is amazing.   They offer many different youth programs and have an abundant selection of resources from books, media, to online reources.  Not every community is as fortunate as we are to have such resources available to them.  Whiile brainstorming ways to reach out to our immigrant families, it dawned on me that some families in our district may not be aware of how useful our library is.  They may have visited but never had a tour to see the available resources. To reach out to our families, the library has agreed to host a family night.

I am excited about this.  This is a very cost effective way to reach out to families.  Most public libraries will offer similiar services at no charge.  What a great idea for those on a tight budget.  As we know, most of our schools are these days.  We need to utilize our resources.  Plus it promotes literacy and it's a great parent outreach opportunity.

The evening is still in the making but I have secured the date and the details are in the works.  Our vision is to separate the parents and children.  The parents will receive an adult resource tour of the library and the children will enjoy story time in our children's library.  At the end of the evening families can receive a library card and check out materials.  

For those of us who are born and raised in a community with a public library, this event may seem like a waste of your time, but for many families who are new to our country, this event will be very valuable and exciting as they become aware of the new opportunites available to them at no charge.  

I have a little over a month until this event.  This will provide me plenty of time to get prepared.  I wiil need to invite familes and hire a few translators for our non-English speaking families.  As it gets closer I will update on further details made.  

Use of Grant Funds: Project #1: Providing support to Families

I can't imagine moving to a new country.  I'm a pretty outgoing individual so I think I would yearn to find a community that accepted me and full-filled my social needs.  But I am sure I wouldn't know where to start, especially if I struggled with the language or social norms of the new country in which I moved to. 

With our grant funds we hope to create a fun and supportive program to help newer immigrant families to the US feel more comfortable and address any needs or concerns they may have.  To do this, we have hired two social workers that are perfect for working with immigrant families.  One of the social workers was an immigrant to the US and moved here when she was in high school.  Having this experience will help her make connections with our families. The other social worker comes from a family that migrated to the United States from the Middle East. Her family culture and customs will allow for our families to feel more connected and comfortable knowing she can relate to their situations.  Having these two positions filled is a big load off my project "to do" list. It is a relief to have found two individuals that fit the job description perfectly!

Next, I secured a location for families to meet. I was able to use our community Nature Center to host these programs.  We plan to have two separate groups running at the same time.  Each group will consist of a small group of families and their children.  I'm thinking no more than 8-10 families. While the parents meet with the social workers, a teacher from the nature center will provide an educational program for the students.  During the last 30 minutes or so, the students will switch with the parents and the parents will then receive a nature tour by the teachers and the students will do a team building activity with the social workers.  Each group will meet a total of 4 times for 2 hours.  And of course refreshments will be provided at each session. 

I can breathe knowing I have the social worker positions filled, dates solidified and location determined.  The next big step in this process will be selecting and contacting the families to participate and determining if we will need translators, and if so, post these positions and hire these individuals.  

I am also in the process of working on another project which will consist of family outreach.  

This project is also in the beginning stages and will need to be completed quickly.  I have a few ideas in mind.  I contacted our public library and I'm waiting to hear back from the coordinator there.  I would like to set up an evening where I can invite new immigrant families to the US to visit the library and learn about the resources available to them.  At the same time they can sign up to receive a library card and learn about the summer programs available for children and adults.  And of course refreshments will be served!  As soon as I here back from someone at the library, I can set a date and send out invitations.  

I need to set up one more parent outreach event for our ELL Families and I am still not certain on what to do. Do you have any suggestions?  I thought about an Icecream Social where we have a guest speaker come and share their success stories about coming to America.  This could be inspiring.  

Tomorrow I hope to complete the following tasks.

1. Connect with public library/ set date

2. Determine families to invite for Nature Center

3.  Work on invitation rough draft

4. Come up with a plan for the mystery parent outreach event.

5. Post translator positions for Nature Center/library

Reaching out to our Immigrant Families

Recently my school district has received federal funding to use towards our Immigrant families.  The sole purpose of this funding is to reach out to our families and provide them with valuable resources to be successful in school and our community.  This consists of two separate projects and funding must be spent appropriately.  

I have been hired to facilitate these programs.  This is very exciting for me because I can use my knowledge as an ELL Teacher and my experiences to meet the special needs of these families.  As I brainstorm different ideas through pinterest and the web, I've come to realize how very little information is readily available.  Servicing our English Langauge Learners and their families is a topic on the horizon but still very new to many districts.  English Learners are on the rise in the United States and more districts are faced with this new population of students and are making changes to meet these needs both academically and socially.  My goal is to reach out to these families and meet their needs.  To do this, I must bulid positive relationships within the community of my district and utilize the resources readily available to me. Once I have secured connections within my community, I need to bring these resources to my ELL's and their families.

Please follow me as I share my journey as I try to bridge the gap between our immigrant families and my school district.  This will be an interesting journey.  I work for an amazingly diverse district with over 80 spoken langugages within our schools.  These families consist of many different cultures with different needs.  We have a refugee population and an auto industry population of immigrants.  Some are here for a short period of time and others will reside in our area for many years.  Little or no English is very common for our newcomer families but many times the parents are literate in English.  Some of the spoken langugages are Korean, Manderin, Urdo, Chaldean, Spanish, German, or Portuguese.   We have pocket communites where large groups of immigrants reside in apartments until they decide on a long term home. This means often times students will move mid school year or change schools within the district.  As I brainstorm ways to effectively reach out to these families, I must keep these unique qualities in mind. 

First on my to do list...

1. Contact our public library to see if they would be willing to attend an evening event to promote literacy at home.  

2. Gather a list of potential families to invite. (Realistically I can't invite the entire district.  Room is limited)

3. Set a purpose or topic for the event.

4. Set a date

5. Brainstorm and tap into my community resources.

Time is limited so I need to get moving on this.  We have a budget for food and translators.  My wheels are turning.  Oh the possiblities!

The American Name

When we name our children we put a lot of thought into it. For this will be their name forever....or not. Some names are biblical and others are given after ancestors. They are special because it means you. 

 What happens when your family picks up and moves all across the world to America?  Do you keep your birth given name or change it to the American version? I would believe that's a tough decision to make because either way it's hard. If you keep your name as it was given to you, you get to still be you. Not to mention, it's probably a nice name, and fits you perfectly because that is the perfectly chosen name for you. But, the truth be told, many people, including your teachers will mispronounce your perfect name on a regular basis, and that is frustrating. 

My Name is Yoon by Helen Recorvits is a great book that many ESL Students can relate to. It's a story of a girl named Yoon who moved to the US and her struggles with her new American name.  It's very touching and gives the reader a new perspective from the eyes of a little girl named Yoon who moves across the world to live in America.

Gestures and Tangible Items

As I sit in a conference on teaching EL's, the discussion of teaching vocabulary became a top discussion. The presenters discussed how looking up definitions alone, are not effective in the fact that words have multiple meanings and may be hard to distinguish the correct meaning in the text.

Instead we discussed the value of teaching definitions by using gestures and tangible items. This helps students make meaning either visually or orally.

Here are some other ways to help with understanding vocabulary.
1. Video clips
2. Previewing text before reading
3. Making Connections
4. Activating prior knowledge
5. Using context clues
6. Picture cards
7. Visuals
8. Translating to native language (bilingual text)

My big "Aha Moment" was when we discussed how the strategies we use for our English Language Learners is good for ALL Learners.  As classroom teachers receive more ELL's in their classrooms, it's reassuring to know that what we do for the ESL student, we can do for the struggling English learner.

As we collaborate to meet the needs of our English Learners, what are some other ways to teach vocabulary to our students? Please share.