Who are we?
Welcome to the English Language Education Department in the Rutland Elementary Schools (Naquag and Glenwood)!
We have a small but growing population of students that speak more than English in our elementary schools and they show how diverse our populations are. We currently represent 12 different languages spoken at home. Teachers at our schools do our very best to engage students in different ways to use the English language to retell, explain, argue and describe their ideas. We work hard to expand their working vocabularies so that they can communicate with greater detail and complexity when speaking and writing and to engage in the nuances of academic text. Students are also engaged with increasing their literacy in English from the foundational skills of learning to read to higher levels of comprehension in fiction and non-fiction texts.
Why call our students Heroes?
Simply because they are!!!
1. Many of our English Learners have to work twice as hard to navigate between two or more languages daily in their lives. Learning the rules of English can be difficult and whether you are a new immigrant to the United States or coming from a household where English is not the home language, it can be overwhelming. So those students that come in daily ready to learn takes a huge amount of effort which can really tire a kid out.
2. Being bilingual or multilingual is a SUPERPOWER! The stories I have heard about students that have helped out their parents, siblings or peers when a situation comes up requiring the ability to translate especially emergency situations; WOW! To be able to navigate between two languages can save lives and is a skill that can give them more job opportunities.
3. Research shows that students that know more than one language use strategies that make them stronger learners in general.
Click above to go to the page with a family toolkit you can download and resources in many languages!
Feel free to reach out to me at sara_root-simone@wrsd.net
Find my facebook page dedicated to literacy at: