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SD61 ELL Teacher Newsletter
For Teachers of Multilingual Learners, JUNE 2024
Greetings!
It is June 1 and ELL case managers are now planning for supplemental supports for students in the next school year. At this time, the annual spring assessments of students on your caseload should be complete and Annual Instructional Plans (AIPs) for the 2024-2025 school year are progressing. Please refer to the instructions for the spring assessments, which is found below as well as on the SD61 homepage. Please prioritize students in grades 5 and 8 as transition meetings are taking place and having up-to-date information to share would be helpful. Also, their AIPs will transfer to their new middle or secondary school's ELL case manager on June 21 and they will no longer be accessible.
Case managers are responsible for doing the yearly spring assessments and writing new AIPs for the 2024-2025 school year. Oral language assessments and templates for unaided writing samples are in the shared Google drive entitled ELL/ESD Teacher Resources. Once assessments are complete, use the results to determine the development of brand new AIPs with new goals and suggested supports and adaptations. Sections A to E as well as H (uploaded assessments) should be filled in for all AIPs for the 2024-2025 school year by Friday, June 21. In the fall and before September 30, case managers will complete the remaining sections F and G in the AIPs once their support schedules have been established. Please reach out to classroom teachers in your school(s) to inquire whether there are any students who are not currently receiving support this year who they think should be considered for supplemental support next year.
All funding-eligible ELL students for next year require a new AIP for the 2024-2025 school year. Funding eligible means that next year they will have 5 years or less years of support on the 1701. At least one language assessment must be completed (oral, reading or writing) for every student this spring and a new goals set in the 2024-2025 AIP by the end of this school year.
Writing Samples - When an unaided student writing sample is taken as part of the assessment then teacher comments and annotations must be evident on the paper. Please refer closely to the BC ELL Standards when noting strengths and stretches as the AIP goals should be related to what is in your notes on the paper. Unless a student is at the beginning stage, writing topics for middle and secondary school should require the use of persuasion or compare and contrast. Please see the shared Google file for writing prompts.
Please feel free to reach out to Jen Barber at jbarber@sd61.bc.ca for guidance or if you have any questions.
With gratitude,
Jen Barber, District ELL Teacher Support
David Hovis, District Principal
Helpful Links for the Spring Assessments
New Helpline for Reporting Racist Incidents in BC
Grants for Families: Extracurricular Activities
-Kidsport: https://kidsportcanada.ca/british-columbia/provincial-fund/
-Jumstart:https://jumpstart.canadiantire.ca/pages/individual-child-grants
-L.I.F.E program (50 free access to recreation center activities, can be applied in all recreation centers, such as:
https://planh.ca/success-stories/capital-region-life-flourishes-recreation-facilities
-Athletics4kids: https://www.a4k.ca/apply_now
-Viasport: https://www.viasport.ca/grants/other-funding-sources
-Other possible grants: https://britishcolumbia.grantwatch.com/cat/34/sports-and-recreation-grants.html
Multicultural Calendar
Recommended Resources
Multilingual & Dual Language Resources
1. Nalibali is a free multilingual story website out of South Africa. It contains dual language books in English and one of the numerous dialects in this region: https://nalibali.org/story-resources/multilingual-stories
2. RAZ Plus has books in many languages:
Select books in multiple languages (right side near top) - French, Polish, Spanish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese https://www.raz-plus.com/books/leveled-books/.
3. Storybooks Canada is one of our favourite 3 sites for online books in many languages.
4. https://www.uniteforliteracy.com/
Unite online library provides free access to more than 400 original picture books, one fourth of them written in Spanish. The digital books provide audio narrations in more than 40 languages, spoken by native speakers in warm, expressive voices. The languages of narration include indigenous and endangered languages along with languages most widely spoken in the US. Our publishing services include the ability for our partners to curate and embed a selection of books on their websites.
Co-Teaching & Co-Planning: Quick Strategies for Making Adaptations
Comprehensive and approachable guidance on time-saving co-planning strategies are offered in this article and episode on Tan Huynh's website, Empowering ELLs.
https://tankhuynh.com/5-co-planning-strategies/
The Empowering ELLs website listed above is a wonderful resource to use and share with colleagues. On his homepage, look on the right side for "Collaboration".
To simplify the wording of more complex text:
- https://rewordify.com/
- This is a helpful resource for simplifying wording of more complex text.
Newsela
This is a US-based newspaper, written for educational purposes. Every article is available at five reading levels. Therefore, this is a great way to differentiate reading in the classroom. While this resource has not officially been sanctioned by GVSD, it is possible to print off interesting articles at different reading levels for students.
Academic Language Function Toolkit
- https://sweetwaterschools.instructure.com/courses/1080113/files/31344925
- This is a great resource for the teacher to use when supporting students. This document provides numerous sentence stems and frames (and more) to help students with their writing.
Free SIOP Training and Resources (Sheltered Instruction):
Here are some other strategies:
- Use adapted or translated texts. If they are doing a novel, see if it can be found in his home language. If not, see if there is an adapted version (for kids) or an audiobook version.
- Literature Circles with graphic novels like ABC or Persepolis are great.
- Ask the student(s) to write in his home language, and translate it into English afterwards. Make sure you are assessing the content of the ideas rather than the writing style or grammar (rubrics are great to help with this).
- Offer paragraph and sentence stems to help students.
- Poetry is great for ELL students because it is free from rigid grammar rules.
ProD Opportunities
SIOP Training
Use your ProD funds to take this self-paced course on how to support newcomer Immigrant and Refugee students in any classroom using the SIOP.