What I've Learned (Thus Far)

Well, unfortunately I haven't been quite as diligent in keeping up with this blog as I had hoped - which I expected would happen anyway! I have taught completely full-time for exactly 8 days and I love it. Some days are definitely harder than others, but overall I could not have asked for a better experience. I've said it before and I will say it again - I know this is what I want to do with the rest of my life. I'm grateful I've figured that out as early as I have - some aren't so lucky.

I work with 9 groups of students, the smallest group is with 2 and the largest with 13. I am doing 3 different units with these groups. One is a Picture Word Inductive Model (PWIM), another is on the very basics of space, and the final is doing different text elements with The Lion and the Mouse fable. I am waaaay behind schedule on the Lion and the Mouse units, but otherwise am doing pretty good. 

I did have an eye-opening experience last week with one of the PWIM groups. The basic aspects of PWIM is to pull out vocabulary from a picture, categorize the vocabulary, use that vocabulary in single sentences and finally a paragraph. In the first week we did a picture of a city. At the end of that unit, we read the book Abuela by Arthur Dorros and did the Google Lit Trip on it. (Google Lit Trips are super cool, but I'm not going to go into that.) As you might be able to tell, Abuela has a lot of Spanish elements. One of the classes I did this unit with is made up of 4 students, 3 of them Spanish-speakers. The other boy is Ethiopian and speaks Amharic. While I realized he does not know any Spanish, the meaning is easy to understand because of context clues in English and in the pictures. 

However, when we began to read this book, this boy was far from excited. After reading the book together, he was asked what was his favorite part. His answers: None of it. Okay, the English part. 

Now, I don't think I picked this book to read because the majority in my class speaks Spanish. I think I picked this book because A) the library had it, and B) the Google Lit Trip. I've always wondered how as teachers we are supposed to show that retaining your first language is important while teaching English. I thought integrating books like this would be a great way to do it. But I do not think I will do what I did again. What I did was make that boy feel like a minority in the only part of his school day where he may not feel like one. The ESL classroom should be a safe haven for students, and I took that away from him. 
The next day before doing the Lit Trip, I introduced Google Earth. I showed the students parts of Sioux City that they are familiar with. Along with this, I showed some places in Ethiopia. However, there is no way that makes up for how I made this boy feel. 

So my conclusion is that if I have ESL classrooms that are totally homogeneous in their first language, I will use resources like this one. If I do not, I will not use these in instruction. It is unfair to focus on one language, where resources may be more easily accessible, and not on another. I do wonder how I can really show that my students' languages are important if I don't use them in instruction however. I do not think that providing books to checkout really is enough. But I cannot allow some of my students to feel like they are less important than others due to this problem. I definitely need to do some more exploring of this issue.