It is always a privilege to work with amazing people. A great team can keep a teacher from drowning during the school year and I have been very lucky to work with such a team.

Much of ESOL instruction is cross-curricular in nature.

Students must learn how to navigate academic material in a variety of disciplines and that material must be accessible, accurate, and rigorous while also being written on an appropriate Lexile level.

• In order to ensure that our students make smooth progress through the ESOL program, I used the WIDA key-use standards to create a user-friendly way of tracking the objectives the ESOL department is teaching. A copy of this chart is also used to track individual students' mastery of skills.

• While we use the National Geographic curriculum provided by the district, I also like to supplement instruction whenever possible to focus on project based learning. This skeletal pacing guide I've created outlines the projects we will be completing as part of the Beginner ESOL course. Parent letters and contact information are provided to students in a separate file because we are mostly digital.

• As part of a collaboratively planned unit for intermediate students (ESOL III), we used a graphic organizer to track details of a variety of stories we watched, heard, or read in class in order to determine the genre and theme of the story. Students used these graphic organizers to compare the themes and details of multiple stories in order to have a broader understanding of the genre itself.

• As part of the genre-study unit, students read a novel as a class and completed a series of graphic organizers, participated in class discussions identifying details from the text to support their answers, and watched short clips from various films and TV shows in order to practice identifying features of the genre. The unit plan also focused on context clues and reading strategies to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words.

• As part of the same genre study unit, beginner students worked together to read a series of stories and respond to a variety of prompts provided on a choice board. (This resource was created by Ms Smith)