Curriculum

Alright - so my school district doesn't have a curriculum for ESL teachers, so the other ESL teacher and I have been spending some time this summer compiling our resources and outlining a basic curriculum.  We are finding it harder than we thought! When we are done we are hoping to have a good start on a k-2 curriculum.  Here is a look at the resources we are using:

1.) The NYSESLAT Binder - this has all the sample tests.  We use this to make sure we are creating parallel activities so that the format of the NYSESLAT is no surprise come May.  Also we have activities we can use as a formal assessment.

2.) Thoughtful Classroom resources - Last year my school district started using the Thoughtful Classroom as a unit/lesson design format.  It is a great way to approach unit design.  I will post more on this with a sample unit (or two or three or more?!) later.

3 & 4.) Backpack & Cornerstone Pockets - These are some curriculum samplers that I received from our BOCES years ago.  We pull supplemental activities and resources from these books.

5.) Oxford Picture Dictionary for the Content Areas for Kids - We received these just this past year.  We are finding them to be a bit too high for our kindergarten students.  However there are some really great things in here!  The pictures are fantastic.  The reproducible collections are great for vocabulary cards, and it has follow-the-directions activities.  There are matching activities, crosswords and word searches.  We also bought the teacher's edition, and workbooks along with the dictionaries themselves.

6.) Make Your Own Pictionary - This is a super old curriculum designed for K students.  I have been using this for my K classes for the past few years.  However I found that they are definitely outdated ('paste' instead of 'glue') and misses some important words and puts in others that make no sense.  It's not all bad though the unit pictures are great for coloring pages and discussions.  It also introduced the idea of a pictionary of all the words we learn in the year.  The kids love taking home a book of all their words at the end of the year.