Hello! My name is Catharen Kann and I am the ELL teacher at Mason Rice. Ginko Isobe teaches with me. We work with the children in small groups or one on one in their classrooms and in the ELL room. We work with your child’s classroom teacher to coordinate the English work we do with what your child’s class is learning in reading, writing, science, and social studies. We often “scaffold” the classroom work by adding supports, such as teaching extra vocabulary, background information, and grammar. In our ELL lessons we practice listening, speaking (social and academic), reading, writing, vocabulary, and grammar.

If your child is a beginner, we work with him/her everyday with language and topics in our ELL beginner curriculum. We usually teach the beginners in the ELL room during Reading and Writing. We teach in the classroom during Science and Social Studies and scaffold what the class is doing to your child's level. For intermediate level students, we work in the classroom or in the ELL room during Reading and Writing. If the class reading is too hard, we choose reading lessons at your child's English level but we still teach the reading strategies that his/her class is learning at that time.

We work with the advanced students 2-4 times a week for extra help with class writing, reading, vocabulary, and grammar. If a child is advanced in ELL, but still needs to improve in one skill area such as speaking or vocabulary, we form a group of two to three children with similar needs and work together on that skill two or three times a week.

Our goal is for your child to be well integrated in his/her class, to be able to access the grade level curriculum, AND to learn English at the same time in a supportive environment!

This year we have about 30 ELL students at Mason Rice and they speak: Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Turkish, Russian, German, Norwegian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Hebrew. However, there are many more kids that speak a second language at home in our school! They do not all need extra English support. In fact, about 23% of kids in Newton speak another language besides English!

In the Newton Public Schools, kids generally are in the ELL program for three to five years, and up to seven years. For more information and details on the NPS ELL Program go to the Newton Public Schools English Language Learners website.

To contact me with a message or question, please email me at : Catharen Kann.

Thank you! "It takes a village to raise a child." -African proverb

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