Good afternoon everybody!!
This week I'm continuing my series on content-area instruction for ELs. If you missed it or want to refer back to it, the math email can be found here and the science one is here. This week is social studies, also known as history!
Ah, history. Arguably one of the most difficult subjects for our students due to the amount of reading, heavy language load (lots of content-specific words!), and lack of familiarity with the subject. However, there are lots of things that teachers can do to help make history-related subjects more accessible to their English learners. Here are some tips:
- Use visuals as much as possible. This includes not only pictures, but also graphs, colors, or graphic organizers. Just make sure your students understand how to read a graph! You can also use colors to easily tie things together.
- Consider using websites like NewsELA or Rewordify to find or create texts that are at your students' reading levels.
- Include students' cultures, languages, and/or current events in your curriculum. History is great because you can connect events from different times and areas to what you're studying! Josh Carlson does great at this; he utilizes Japanese, Arabic, French, Spanish, and other languages in his classroom, and also addresses current events like the coup in South Sudan that happened or the fire at Notre Dame that both happened this week.
- Similarly, make the content relevant. Relate it to their own lives and the people that came before them.
- Connect to students' background knowledge.
- Include visuals and definitions on tests to help ESL students.
- Just like in other content areas, create bilingual glossaries or print one out from this website.
- Utilize multilingual chapter summaries found on these websites: American History, Geography, Government, and World History
- Explicitly teach the symbols that many US-raised and educated students understand, but that ELs don't, such as Uncle Sam or Lady Liberty. A list can be found here.
That's it for now! Next week will be more general tips for any content area.