Moving Beyond for Multilingual Learners: The Blog

 Please, please forgive me if this sounds obvious but I just want to say it and share it.  In the Chicagoland area and across Illinois really, we are experiencing larger influxes of newcomer students and families. Our winters here are BRUTAL. I know a lot of us spend time ensuring that our students have access to coats, snow pants, snow boots, mittens, hats, and scarves- and I THANK YOU for this. This is so important!!  A gentle note here to please be sure you are not the only one in your school checking these things out. You need a network - a team of allies and supporters. This may come in the form of social workers, the math teacher down the hall, teammates in the fine arts department, a PTA member, your student services administrator - possible allies are everywhere!  Please also check to ensure that if families need shovels and salt (they may have no idea why we salt the ice), they know where to find them. If families you serve live in apartment complexes where ...

 During winter months ( December Chaos , Testing Season , Seasonal Affective Disorder ), there's a big need to unwind and co-regulate with students. During these months, I turn to fun and relaxing videos, various noise frequencies, and coloring pages (for both myself, and for those I serve!). Did you know you can create customized coloring pages from images you take? Crayola does the work for you, and it's actually quite easy. Just go here . You don't have to set up an account or anything (thank goodness), and you just upload an image and then have Crayola turn it into a printable coloring page for you!  For example, here's a photo I took of Mrs. Spina reminding students of one of their mantras - I CAN DO HARD THINGS! I just did a Word Art insert on a Google Doc , made the borders of the words super thick, printed it out, snapped a pic, and it's ready to upload!  Here's the original image of me (simplest backgrounds work best):  And here's what good ole'...

 I keep seeing variations of the post on my social media feeds about the pure CHAOS that is teaching between Fall/Winter breaks (some schools still call these Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks, even though not all in our communities celebrate these- so it may be cool to consider a more inclusive language shift here!). I appreciate the humor and the VERY CLOSE TIE to reality! December is hard! A lot of us educators, leaders, caregivers, family members, and school personnel are walking around especially dysregulated - and so are our students.  There are concerts, parties, shows, social gatherings, and more - all packed into a tight 3-week span. Our to-do lists multiply, and if you are also doing preparations for ACCESS testing upon returning, this can feel really overwhelming. What are some small moves that we can do to support ourselves and our students?  Planned Rest is an intentional move where we dedicate time (5 minutes here, 7 minutes there - or a full 30 minutes - do...

 If you're looking for some fun ways to create learning experiences that enhance vocabulary AND that are also linguistically inclusive of newcomer students, then you've found the right SPOT.  Spot It! was a game that my own family started to play A LOT during the pandemic. They have lots of different versions of the game at most online retailers like Amazon. Spot It! can be played a number of ways, but it's a great game for kids (and adults) of all ages - and you don't *need* language to play. The way we play most as a family is finding a match with two cards. Whoever finds the match first either says it out loud or points to it, then they keep the pair of cards. We keep going until the deck is gone.  I started to think this would be great for students who are acquiring language since they don't have to be fluent to fully participate. I also started to wonder if there was an online generator that I could use to create experiences for my students with vocabulary that...

We love and appreciate our school nurses! When supporting newcomer students (or students newer to their English language journey), it is important to keep a few things in mind.  Check out this resource that you can print for your school nurse, so that they may feel better equipped to serve and support their newcomer students. The front page is a TIP SHEET for school nurses, and the second page is a list of simplified phrases with printer-friendly icons from The Noun Project. You may want to print and laminate this as a two-sided document for easy access for your school nurse. Hope this helps!

I love creating tools that I can reuse again and again. This is one that I used for teaching newcomers story elements using the 5 W Questions (Who, What, Where, When, Why). Aside from Spanish which I translated myself, I have these ready to go in the following languages using AI Translations. As always, I'm always excited to receive feedback and corrections to better serve students- so if you have corrections/edits - please send them my way at carlymspina@gmail.com. THANK YOU!   Russian   Spanish     Ukrainian Portuguese Polish Here's a blank template (with English, the graphics, and a space for an additional language) AND AS A BONUS (because it doesn't fit anywhere else, haha) here is a quick Newcomer-facing BEGINNING DIRECTIONS sheet ! Again, nothing fancy, but it looks like this:

At the beginning of the school year, I always encourage folks to prep a ton of these in anticipation of newcomer students that will arrive throughout the school year. Please note that this is one example of a template. You can open the templates, go to FILE and MAKE A COPY so that you can customize these to better fit your needs! This sample template I have ready is for English/Spanish newcomers . I Need Cards - please note that this template has the same tool but presented a few different ways. These are a tool that I reference in my proficiency snapshot tool for classoom & content teachers (a scaffold I'd recommend for level 1 students). As students are beginning their language journeys in English, they may just feel comfortable raising their hand and pointing. As they grow in confidence and have had ample time to practice, they may say these sentences out loud. Here's a quick TikTok that walks through these. **I recently (9/10/23) used AI and digital translation resour...