One of the biggest things for teachers of ELL students to keep in mind when planning lessons or units is that they need to incorporate each of the four language modalities: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. These work together to help students acquire the English language.

There are tons of strategies teachers can use to help their ELL students. Here are a few of my faves:

Make text easier to read:

Simplifying directions and emphasizing text is a pretty quick and simple way for teachers to make text easier for ELLs to read. You can bold, underline, highlight, or enlarge text to make certain words standout to students so they can pick out the key words.

Think-Pair-Share

This is a common strategy in a lot of classes, but it works great for ELL students, too! Give students a couple minutes to think about something and then have them pair up with someone to share their thoughts. This gives students a chance to both speak and listen! (And if you do Think-Ink-Pair-Share, they can write, too!)

Color Coding

You can use color coding in so many ways! As a Geometry teacher, I color code when calculating area and perimeter. I'll shade in the area in blue and trace the perimeter in red and then use those same colors to show my calculations. When we do similar figures, I trace over pairs of corresponding sides or angles in the same color. I color code as much as possible - especially this past year when my students were learning through a screen!

Graphic Organizers

I have fallen in love with graphic organizers! They can take on so many forms - foldables are probably my favorite (who doesn't love making things 3D?) with Venn diagrams being a close second. Graphic organizers are a great way to help students organize information in a visual way. Check out the page about my Interactive Notebooks to see a few of my favorite graphic organizers!

Hands-on Activities

Using manipulatives or realia is a great way to help ELL students learn and make connections. I love how they help students who are visual or tactile learners. Your manipulatives don't have to be fancy - my "Shape Buckets" are shapes I copied and cut out on cardstock and then laminated and re-cut out. It's something super basic (but really time consuming the first year!), but they really help students when identifying characteristics of shapes or sorting shapes into Venn diagrams.