Making the Abstract Accessible
Reading and writing will always be fun but challenging subjects to teach because they are more closely related to teaching children to think than they are teaching children actual content, unlike Social Studies or Science.
This becomes even more challenging when your students come from language poverty backgrounds or are struggling to find their way two different languages at a young age.
Having learned to speak a second language later in life, I can relate to my students when they're asked to perform multiple cognitive tasks in a second language. For example, talking to someone in Spanish about my opinions about the weather or newest books or movies is easy. However, it's much harder for me to explain how to work a math problem as I'm doing it. If I've worked it already, my brain can then devote itself to processing the information out in the second language, but if I'm explaining it as I go, it's much more difficult because my brain is already using most of its available RAM (pardon the computing metaphor) to process the math.
Think about what this means for your ESL or low language learners.
Suppose you're a student grappling with spelling, recalling unfamiliar but potentially usually vocabulary, managing sloppy handwriting into something legible and thinking also about what you want to say and translating it in your head.
Now, add the cognitive process of having to see the abstract connections of information and grammatical structures of language to that.
See why it's so hard for them?
What seems implicit to the native speaker is only implicit because the meaning of what has been said is clearer than the words themselves. As long as the brain is occupied deciphering the symbols on the page it's too busy to see the meaning behind it, and therefore unable to see the connections.
How to Help
Explicit modeling helps the implicit become visible for ELL's. Help your students see what the connections are through modeling and activities that decrease erase the other cognitive processes so that they can focus on the connections you're wanting them to make.
This is why I created the Popcorn Paragraph structure project. The paragraph is already written for the students in a way that gives them friendly manipulatives that allow for a margin of error and correction that lengthy writing and erasing does not. Your students minds will be free to concentrate on the meaning of what's being said and the relationships of the types of sentences they're working with rather than muddling down into the other cognitive processes that would keep them from learning to see relationships in meaning and structure.
YouTube Modeling
Ramon writes a paragraph explaining the types of sentences as he goes. Click the picture above to see it!
Popcorn Project
You can preview the project itself here at my TPT store:
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