Say+What?+-+teacher+speak

Bridging
Using concepts from content taught in Spanish (or a first language) to learn academic vocabulary in a second-language.

Think of bridging as using the concepts of peanut butter to stick the vocabulary breads of two languages together. The jelly in the middle can be specific examples of these concepts the students can see in their world.

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Anything with this acronym preceding the title will have materials about newly adopted content-based units of study, where Social Studies and Science standards are integrated in a comprehensive way throughout literacy and language development (English to speakers of other language, also overall language development for young students). =====

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Read: students read and write about social studies and/or science topics. They learn the important concepts about our world while strengthening their reading and writing abilities at the same time. =====

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This year the district in Green Bay is piloting a new, progressive way of teaching our bilingual students (also with the hope of educating more students to be bilingual). As in everything in education we are reinventing an old idea, reinvigorating the core ideals of it. A Content-Based Unit of Study is much like how our Kindergarten and First grade teachers taught us when we were kids. We went to school and we learned about, say, nutrition, and we read about it, talked about it, did math problems about it, and applied it to our own world. The Content-Based Units of Study (and someday I will stop capitalizing them once I can remember the whole name) strengthens these running concepts through the subject areas we teach. Science and Social Studies are no longer ignored and shoved into the corner for only when we have "extra time" but come to the fore-front as the interesting and engaging vehicle through which we teach the very concepts embedded in the grade-level standards, but also reading, writing, AND language skills with equal importance. =====

TPR - Total Physical Response
A great practice for students of any age to aid in comprehension and retention of academic vocabulary. Typically used with ELL (English Language Learning) students to help with second-language vocabulary acquisition, TPR helps ALL students learn difficult vocabulary. And it's fun!