I am an ELL teacher and our ELL program is moving toward a push-in model. I’m wondering if any ELL teachers have supported EL students using the Daily Cafe strategies either in their own classrooms or as part of a model that supported teachers in their general education classrooms? Have you been able to align your curriculum and/or your proficiency standards to the Daily 5/Cafe model?
Thanks you,
Jenny Orlandini
Jenny,
We do have an Sp/Eng dual language program at my school, but still have several ELLs in our classrooms whom parents have decided to keep in Eng classes or who have home languages other than Spanish. I can speak best about our first grade team, and can tell you that Daily 5 is a good way, I feel, to get students involved in our daily language block.
There is so much visual support for Daily 5 that will be easily understood by ELL kiddos. Just by adding very simple (even stick figure drawings) when needed gives support on I-charts and for Choice signals. The practice of, for example, modeling the correct way to do read to self as explained in the D5 book and here on the site will also support their understanding.
That word “modeling” is the word for you to keep in mind–model, model, model whatever learning you are asking them to do. Finding a good partner for Read to Someone would provide a good student model for the ELL student.
Are you in a Common Core state? If so, here on the site are menus that have already been aligned for you. Here’s a link to a matrix of those, and from there you can get to specific ones for each grade level.
https://www.thedailycafe.com/articles/common-core-alignmentgrades-18-matrix
Hope this helps a little.