Mrs. Christensen's Teaching Blog

As an ESL teacher it is easy for my lessons to reflect the diversity of my class and world. My lessons reflect standards that focus on reading, writing, speaking and listening which are easily adapted to include multicultural activities. It is important that my class celebrates diversity and creates a safe space for students to talk about their cultures as well as the cultures of the host culture we are in. At various times I have taught students from different countries (Russian, Israeli, Latvian, German) in a school culture (American) that differs from the host country culture (Estonia). On any given class period we would discuss American traditions as well as Estonian and Russian. It is important for students to experience learning from multiple perspectives and multiple cultures. A lesson about describing connections can be taught about comparing and contrasting key characters from a texts. This lesson teaches about multiple perspectives (highlighting two different perspectiv

This blog post includes differentiation strategies to meet the needs of my students to make sure they are able to access the content that is taught. My kindergarten classroom is focusing on an English Language Arts Standard where the objectives address: asking and answering questions about key details, main idea and supporting details and connections between characters, ideas and events. As explained by McCarthy, 2014) learning is making a cohesive unit out of the what the teacher is responsible for and what the students bring to the classroom. As the teacher I am responsible for: content, process and product, while the students bring readiness (current skill level), interests (choices and background) and learning process (brain/multiple intelligences). Image (McCarthy, 2014)  I will ensure that my classroom teaching includes differentiation in content, process, product and learning environments for learning disabled students and students of various readiness levels. 

Assessments will help me guide student’s learning. In this post I will explore two kinds of assessments. Formative assessments: informal checks to ensure students understand what is being covered in this unit. Performance Based assessments: summative in nature and demonstrate the learning that has occured at the end of the unit.  Performance based assessments ensure that students don’t just know the information passively but actively use the information in a meaningful way (The School Redesign Network at Stanford University, 2008). Standard in Reading Informational Texts: Key Ideas and Details Within the concept Reading for Informational Texts (targeted at Kindergarten age students) I explored the standard relating to “ key ideas and details ”. I wrote three objectives using SMART guidelines and then explored an assessment that will measure that objective. SMART Objectives are: specific , measurable , attainable , relevant/results oriented and time bound . I will hi

Unpacking a standard is a great way to break down subject content and skill set and ensure that your students are learning the specific objectives in a way that is measurable. This process while may seem cumbersome at first it does help teachers to plan learning activities that are necessary and to design assessments that actually measure the standard and targeted skills. I enjoyed unpacking the skills and proficiencies that needed to be learned to achieve the standard. It was great to determine the specific concepts that the students had to demonstrate. I chose to access students based on beginning, approaching and achieving benchmarks. Backwards mapping helps to produce proficiencies, assessments and learning tasks that ensure that the standard is met. The ultimate aim for developing standards (as well as the big ideas) and sound  curriculum implementation is to ensure that students can apply their learning autonomously in various contexts (McTighe, 2012).  Figuring out profici

The literacy standard in reading informational texts that I am looking into, for kindergarten is: “ Key Ideas and Details” . It came from Common Core State Standards . I chose this standard because it contains foundational skills that ESL students, who are newly exposed to English, need to learn. This standard helps to foster students’ exposure to an adequate range of texts and tasks (Common Core Standards Initiative, 2017). Proficiencies that the student will develop in meeting the standards With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text Beginning: can ask  and answer 1-2 questions about key details Approaching: can and answer ask 3-4  questions about key details  Achieving: can and answer ask 5 questions about key details  With prompting and support, identify the main topic and retell key details of a text. Beginning: can identify the main topic OR retell 1 or more key details Approaching: can identify the main topic OR ret