[Froggy]

My curriculum director wants me to put together a packet for the teachers. I don't want it to be just another folder of handouts. What do your districts do to help the regular teachers? Any ideas on what I should include? THANKS!

[PanchaO]

Are you talking or ESL?

[lillian]

How funny! I read this under "Recent Posts" and never thought to look at what board it had been posted on. I saw "mainstreamed" and immediately thought SPED. So sorry. I'll erase my post.

[alieliza]

Every year we (the ESL department) try to help the classroom teachers for what's ahead with tips and techniques by way of frequent collaboration and discussion as well as resources (handouts containing websites, activity ideas, appropriate ways to integrate ELLs into the classroom experience, (some of this I have on a word document if you're interested) etc. as well as appropriate books for their classrooms on the reading/linguistic levels of ELLs in their classes). We also provide them with professional resources/readings.

We've recently combed all of our professional resources (Second Language Teaching Literature, Professional Publications [ASCD magazines -- certain issues on ELLs and Diversity], etc) and picked out the most helpful chapters/articles on Literacy and ELLs, best practices, understanding and embracing diversity, etc. We will be distributing one or two articles monthly to teachers.

In addition, I highly recommend the following books:

The Classroom Teacher's ESL Survival Kit #1 & 2 by Elizabeth Claire and Judy Haynes
This is from the back cover:

This resource book features 130 reproducible activities for teachers of grades 2-6+ [book 2 covers Kindergarten also] who have ESL students in addition to mainstream students. The book also contains notes on culture shock and language acquisition, plus strategies, tips, and lesson plans to help social and academic adjustment. Activities help develop vocabulary, listening skills, reading, writing, following directions, math, health, and more, giving teachers a wealth of ready-to-use classroom material.

I also love the Amazing! English Newcomer's Kit, and I find the Amazing! English How-to Handbook to be an excellent professional resource. In fact, it was used a text book in one of my university classes, Its really great for ESL and classroom teachers alike.

[MrChapp]

My school only had ELL for my last year there, and it wasn't very good. Here's what most of our teachers would have liked, though.

Most of our ELL students (at least 95% I'd say) spoke English fluently or close to fluently. They had some problems with Language Arts, but we could deal with it.

Our main problem was our parents did NOT all speak English very well, if at all. We had a really hard time communicating with them about their child's progress and behavior, as well as about school procedures. We also didn't know much about the cultures our kids were coming from (mainly Arabic and Indian). Some information on how to effectively communicate with parents would have really helped us out a lot!

We were given a folder of handouts for our students. I put it in my file cabinet and never looked at it again.

[alieliza]

In New York City we are very lucky as the Dept. of Education provides us with a Translation and Interpretation Unit. They offer free over the phone translation, and free written translation of documents and letters. I've shared this information with the classroom teachers, and how to contact them... I can only hope that they make use of it.