Dollar Deals @ Scholastic Teaching Express

Did you know that you can follow "I Teach Dual Language" on Facebook?  I update the Facebook page a little more often than this blog and try to include only links and other info that would be truly useful to bilingual/dual-language teachers.

I just posted a link to this website http://teacherexpress.scholastic.com/dollardeals but, as I started to research some purchases for myself, I decided I needed to share the love with those of you that just visit the blog.

Check out these books that you can download as a PDF file for just $1!

¡BASTA CON LAS SÍLABAS!: A Word Study Review Game

Scattergories has always been one of my favorite board games.  Several years ago, I attended a training on word study in my district.  One of the games that we played in English was Word Family Scattergories.  You can see another version of this game here.  Like the typical bilingual teacher, I was quickly thinking about how to transfer this over into my Spanish Word Study class.  Using syllables or word parts, the game ¡BASTA CON LAS SÍLABAS! was born.


My second graders loved it and it became a favorite activity for students to do whenever they finished their Word Study work early.  At the end of every six weeks, we would play the game as a class.  Using this gameboard or just using the patterns we had studied that grading period, I would write the patterns on the board.  Students thought about the patterns and noted their words on mini dry erase boards.  I would have them stand up and we would go from student to student asking them to read aloud their word for the #1 pattern.  If the other students heard a word that they had written down, all with that word had to sit down.  After each student had read his/her word, all of the students still standing received one point for their words.

You can find me with my nose in a book!: Good Reads Linky!

I just read this post over at Krista's Second Grade Superkids and I knew immediately that I had to join in the Good Reads Linky Party over at Mrs. Standford's Class.





One of the things I am most looking forward to over summer vacation is having time to read.  While I already have no less than ten books currently on my night stand, I am excited to see what everyone else is reading.  I believe that book selection is a window to someone's soul and it is always fun to find a cyber "kindred spirit" (Anne of Green Gables anyone?).

Recent Reads:
  
For almost twelve years, I have been in a book club of ten amazing women that, at one point, all taught together at the same elementary school.  Over the years, most of us have moved away to different schools or different jobs but we still faithfully meet for dinner, wine, and a book discussion EVERY month.  To say that I love these women is a gross understatement!

Rhymers will be Readers: Books for Teaching Rhyming in Context

Okay, I know you have been hearing a lot about rhyming from me and I promise this will be the last post (at least for awhile!).  I just finished reading the book Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to our Children will Change Their Lives Forever.    It was SOOOO good!  Seriously, it summed up practically everything I learned in all my hours of Masters classes to get my M.Ed. in Reading.  It is an easy read and it will make you want to grab your kids or borrow someone else's and go read lots and lots of books together.  If you are a teacher or a parent, it is an essential read!

As I was reading, Mem Fox began to speak about, you guessed it, RHYMING!  :)  She says:
From songs, children learn words, sentences, rhythm, rhyme, and repetition, all of which they'll find later in the books they read.  Kids who can't recognize the fact that two words such as bed and Fred rhyme -- and there are many such kids -- have a hard time learning to read, whereas those who can rhyme are able to make more inspired and more correct guesses about what a particular word might be when they are reading. 
For example, in "Mary Had a Little Lamb," a child familiar with the rhyme would have no difficulty in reading the last word go because it so obviously rhymes with snow:  
Mary had a little lamb
Its fleece was white as snow
And everywhere that Mary went,
The lamb was sure to go.
Rhymers will be readers:  it's that simple.  Experts in literacy and child development have discovered that if children know eight nursery rhymes by heart by the time they're four years old, they're usually among the best readers by the time they're eight.  


So, now do you understand why I have been on a rhyming kick?  I have listed below some fun books available in Spanish with lots rhyme.  This is a short list so please leave your suggestions below in the comments!












As Mem Fox says later in the book "Beginning readers also need to know that the language in sentences usually makes sense."  Good rhyming books add to students' ability to make sense of that they are reading and predict at the micro-level the word or words that are to come next.  I love to play "Guess the Covered Word" using sticky notes in books.  Using Doreen Cronin's book above, I covered the word colchón to see if students could use both meaning and structure to correctly guess the word.  










As you play the rhyming games like those here, here, and here, it is important to always bring that skill back into the context of real text.  What are your favorite books for sharing the love of rhythm and rhyme with your students?

Nonsense Words & Rhyming: ¿Tiene sentido usar palabras SIN sentido?

When I hear the word "nonsense" in English, my first thought is silliness.  I live with a two-year-old and four-year-old so a high percentage of my daily vocabulary is composed of nonsense words.  I just looked up the Spanish definition for "nonsense" and the given synonyms are tonterías and estupideces.  Is it just me or do those words convey a completely different (way more negative) meaning?

There are lots of opinions about whether nonsense words should be used for assessing literacy.  While I can see the reason to not use them for assessment, I don't think they should be off limits for word play.  I found this activity on Pinterest when looking for rhyming activities and was super excited to discover that There's a Wocket in My Pocket is also available in Spanish with the title ¡Hay un molillo en mi bolsillo!

This is the perfect book for introducing the concept of nonsense words to your students.  Like I mentioned in a previous post about rhyming in Spanish, the research says that nonsense words may be used as long as students understand their purpose.  This was good news to me because, if you have ever tried to rhyme in Spanish, you know that you can quickly run out of options!  However, when you manipulate a syllable or two (another important PA skill!), you can create a infinite number of fun rhyming words.

In case you haven't read the Spanish or English version of this Dr. Seuss book, there is a little boy that walks through his house spying silly nonsensical creatures hanging about (la RESA sobre la MESA, ese ÑOFÁ en el SOFÁ, un NEGADERO flotando en el FREGADERO, etc.).  I typed up the rhyming pairs and attached a few to the pockets on the chart above.  Students can read and match the rhyming words that go with the words on the pockets.  Simple and fun!

And a little bonus to familiarizing your students (especially English language learners) with the notion of nonsense words:  In the upper grades, math and science assessments often use nonsense words to describe sets of examples and nonexamples.  A fourth grade bilingual teacher at my training last week thought she might use this book to help her students understand why these tests use crazy words to describe these sets!  I love the opportunity to be with such smart teachers! :)

Speaking in Tongues Film Giveaway Winner

Thanks so much to the teachers that have linked up with our Speaking in Tongues Linky Party this week!  The Linky will remain open through next Friday and we would still love for anyone to join us and help spread the word about what dual language looks like in real life classrooms!

The deadline to enter the giveaway was 5 pm this afternoon and using the Random Number Generator...Da Duh Duh DUHHHHH!  I think I need some serious work on my onomatopoeia! :)

The winner of the Speaking in Tongues Film DVD is Karla from The Spanglish Classroom!  Thanks again to everyone that has linked up with us and a huge THANK YOU to the people at Speaking in Tongues Film for sponsoring this giveaway!  Please visit their website and follow them on Facebook so you can stay up to date on the great work they are doing on behalf of dual language education!

¡Hasta mañana, Iguana! Rhyming Game

Are you looking for a super simple game to help your little ones practice generating rhymes?  This game is a perfect way for students to recall and play with the rhyming words that you have already exposed them to.  I first saw the idea for a rhyming dice game over at http://prekinders.com/rhyme/ and then added a gameboard for a little more friendly competition!

 

I bought a set of 3 of the dice/cubes above at Mardel's for $19.99.  I printed off six photos of words that would be simple for rhyming (fresa, pavo, luna, globo, gato, queso).  I slipped the pictures into the cubes, grabbed one of my Dollar Tree dice and a few counters, and printed out the gameboard below. 

To play the game, the student rolls the rhyming cube and generates a word that rhymes with the picture.  If they roll globo, they could say lobo, robo, bobo, etc.  After saying the rhyming word on the die and their own word, they roll the number die and move forward that number of spaces.  The first one to move their counter to the iguana wins!

What do you think?  Want to try it?  Download the picture cards and gameboard here!

Rima, Rima, Rimador...

Rhyming...if you are a PK/K teacher, that very word could strike terror in your soul!  You have probably been working on rhyming all year and now you are administering assessments on your little ones to see if they can generate rhyming words and identify rhyming pairs. 

I am currently preparing a training for a group of PK/K bilingual teachers on how to teach rhyming in Spanish.  EL Saber has a new resource available for teachers called Palabrimas.  The resource is a series of Spanish rhyming activities that give students the opportunity to practice their rhyming skills to become successful readers. 

While I have always known that rhyming was an important skill for literacy, I really didn't know why.  I could see the need for blending syllables...this helps you read words.  I could see the need for segmenting syllables...this helps you write words.  But rhyming?  Besides being fun, why is it considered so foundational, especially for Spanish-speakers and readers who do not rely on word families for decoding?

Well, after spending several hours searching the research journal databases, I found some really good articles and came up with these general recommendations from their studies on Spanish-speaking bilingual learners and rhyming instruction:

·      Developing the skill of rhyming in both languages simultaneously can help students acquire phonological awareness more quickly due to cross-linguistic transfer.

Dickinson, D., McCabe, A., Clark-Chiarelli, N., & Wolf, A. (2004).

·    Spanish-speaking children may require more exposure than their English-speaking peers to acquire rhyming skills.

Culatta, B., Reese, M., & Setzer, L.  (2006). 

·      Be careful when using visual images because of ELLs’ tendency to emphasize meaning over sound.

Moreira, S. & Hamilton, M.  (2006).

·      Target one rhyme per activity (initially) and provide multiple examples of the targeted rhyming words.  Nonsense words may be included but students must understand their purpose.

Culatta, B., Reese, M., & Setzer, L.  (2006). 

·      While teaching rhyme in Spanish is constrained by the limited number of rhyming word pairs available, teachers may compensate by repeatedly using the same word pairs in a large array of meaningful activities.

Culatta, B., Reese, M., & Setzer, L.  (2006). 

·      Anchor students’ understanding of the words rhyme/rima and rhyming words/palabras que riman.  Prior to reading subsequent stories, check for an understanding of what rhyming is and remind the children to listen for words that rhyme.

Adams, M., Foorman, B., Lundberg, I., & Beeler, T. (1998). 

·      Highlight the ending using intonation and stress.  While reading rhyme stories aloud, exaggerate the meter and rhyme to encourage active listening and anticipation among the children.

Culatta, B., Reese, M., & Setzer, L.  (2006). 

In addition to all of these Palabrimas resources, I have found and created a lot of other rhyming activities/games as well as located A LOT of Spanish rhyming books.  I will post more next week!  Until then...¡Hasta mañana, iguana!  

Nicely Balanced Wheels: My experience as a one-way DL teacher

My first five years of teaching were in a transitional bilingual program.  The percentage of Spanish or English that was taught depended upon the students that were in my classroom as well as other influencing factors.  Percentages were always a funny thing for me though.  I mean, how do you really factor 30% of your day for English in second grade versus 40% of the day when you loop up with your students to third grade?  Despite my own efforts and those of my fantastic fellow teachers, at times it felt like we were spinning our wheels.  We were working very hard and with the best of intentions but I wonder if those language wheels that we equipped our students with looked more like the fourth bicycle than the third.

This picture is from Dr. Joan Wink's website filled with SO much useful research and resources regarding language education.

During my fifth year of teaching, I went on one really good blind date.  Ten months later, I was married and living in another city working as a bilingual teacher for a new school district!  I'm telling you, that was one really good date! :)


During my interview, the bilingual coordinator explained that this district was newly implementing a one-way dual language model of bilingual instruction.  I would be teaching all subjects in Spanish on Mondays and Tuesdays, all subjects in English on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and Friday would be a split day.  This was the schedule of language instruction that was to be followed by all first through sixth grade bilingual teachers.  PreK and Kindergarten teachers alternated languages every day.  


My first year teaching in this model was a huge adjustment.  I had never before taught English phonics or spelling but I learned along with my students and was amazed that they were able to learn twice the amount of spelling patterns than their monolingual peers next door.  For the first time in my teaching career, I really felt like I had begun to equip my students with solid ESL instruction.


Time management was a struggle and, as the only second grade bilingual teacher at my campus, I longed for a teaching peer who could commiserate and problem solve with me.  My own trial and error process led me to draw some conclusions about the dual language process in my district:

• Students can learn spelling patterns in both Spanish and English in the same week but I had to be sure that I was using the very best instructional strategies for them to learn and practice those patterns.  There was no time for fluff or spelling busywork!  As we told the students' parents, this was an accelerated enrichment program and NOT a remedial program!
• Doing Writing Workshop in a 50/50 classroom can be tricky.  If students are given a choice about what they are going to write about, they should also be given a choice about what language they are going to use.  It doesn't make sense for a student to start a piece on Tuesday in Spanish and then have him stop working on it on Wednesday or, even worse, continue the piece in English.  I did eventually give the students a required minimum of pieces in English and pieces in Spanish to insure a balance.
• Self-Selected Reading is similar to Writing Workshop.  It just didn't feel right to tell a student to put down that English chapter book just because it was a Monday or Tuesday.  So, when given a choice about what to read, they could also choose the language of the books to read.  Again, if some students showed a tendency toward only one language, I would conference with them about establishing some goals for both languages.
• With the exceptions of those choice times (WW and SSR), I tried to be as faithful as possible to the language of the day in all of my instruction.  Well, there was one more exception...Fridays!  Fridays were just messy!  I tried having a magical shift from English to Spanish at the stroke of noon but it just never worked.  Because Friday was typically a day of assessing how students could independently demonstrate their mastery of objectives in each of the subjects, I began the practice of providing the assessments in both languages printed on the front and back of the papers.  That way, the students could choose which language they wanted to demonstrate their understanding of the objective.  

I have more conclusions but I will save them for another day.  My goal was to create wheels that were fully balanced and well-inflated that would move my students forward in their language proficiency AND in their academic achievement.  While not perfect, the 50/50 model of dividing language by day did become a workable structure for me that I learned to enjoy.  

I can't wait to learn more about other models and structures that work for teachers around the country!  Please join our Speaking in Tongues Linky Party to share your dual language classroom description!

Speaking in Tongues Linky Party

Tell me you haven't ever had this conversation:  You are casually chatting with someone about what you do and explain that you are a teacher, a dual-language teacher.  The other person acts interested but a bit confused.  They ask, "So is that like ESL?"

"Well," you answer, "It is ESL but it is much more.  How much time do you have?"  As you launch into explaining the complex and intricate details about how you actually do Dual Language, you are likely to receive one of two reactions:  1) "That sounds so cool!  I wish that I (or my children) could have had that type of education!"  or 2)  "But doesn't that just confuse them?  How can they possibly learn subjects like science or math in another language?  Isn't this generation's English bad enough as it is?  Shouldn't we just focus on improving one language?"

At these moments, don't you wish you could invite this acquaintance to sit down and watch this documentary with you?  The clip below is one of 11 free short videos supplementing the hour-long documentary Speaking in Tongues.  You can see more of these short videos at this link.


From The Language Educator, November 2010:  
This hour-long documentary follows four American students whose parents placed them in schools where, from the first day of kindergarten, their teachers speak only Chinese or Spanish. It was shown at the 2009 ACTFL Annual Convention and World Languages Expo in San Diego, CA, and can be used in advocacy efforts to help promote language education.  The award-winning film was selected as the winner of the San Francisco  International Film Festival Audience Award. [It] has been featured on various PBS stations.


Throughout the next two weeks, I Teach Dual Language is hosting a "Speaking in Tongues Linky Party" giving you the opportunity to share what dual-language instruction looks like in your classroom.  One participant's name will be randomly drawn to win a DVD of this documentary!  Thanks so much to the people at Speaking in Tongues Film for providing this giveaway!

In order to participate, please post a description of your dual-language/bilingual classroom on your blog and sign up below.  If you do not have a blog, you can still join the party!  Just email me your description (cgrover@elsaberenterprises.com) and I will post the description here and add you to the Linky.

Based on last month's poll, there is a lot of variety in how we dual!  I can't wait to find out more!

What does Dual Language look like in your classroom?  Is the instruction in different languages divided by time or by subject?  How have you seen DL benefit your students?  What have been the challenges thus far?

1. Candis	2. Learning in Spain	3. The Spanglish Classroom
4. The Second Grade Superkids	5. Susana Velasco	6. Desirée
7. Mrs.G	8. Amanda Nehring

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