Do You Watch PBS Kids?

It’s time for the Wednesday Website suggestion!! For two years, I was the Technology Specialist at a school in Georgia. During that time, I amassed a large collection of websites that I use with my students. If you want to search through some of them, you can check out my IKeepBookmarks site. Or, you can check back here each week for the Wednesday Website suggestion.

Today, I was creating a list of suggestions for a parent who wanted to work with her children at home. As I bounced around different links I had bookmarked, I realized that many of these games and videos came back to one common site, so I eventually just decided to recommend the whole site to her, because there was so much she could use there with her children. So, what site got this glowing recommendation from me? www.pbskids.org is the site, and it’s also this week’s Wednesday Website suggestion.

This site has games, activities and videos (short clips and full length videos) for each of it’s regular shows. (Unfortunately, the video clips do not work outside of the US, which is something I was disappointed to find out when I moved to Morocco – my kids and I miss those videos!) If you aren’t familiar with the shows on PBS Kids, you will find shows like: Clifford, Curious George, Sid the Science Kid, Between the Lions, Cyberchase, Fetch with Ruff Ruffman and Martha Speaks. While some shows are better for small children, many of these shows cover concepts that are the appropriate level for older students as well. For example, many Cyberchase activities work on problem solving within math concepts like area and perimeter, multiplication, and numerical patterns. Martha Speaks works on great vocabulary and Fetch with Ruff Ruffman covers lots of science and social studies topics.

As a parent of small children, I spend a lot of time watching these shows. However, whether you watch these shows or not, they cover great concepts that you can use in your classroom. The games connected with each show allow kids to be interactive with the characters, while still working educational topics.

Do you have a favorite PBS Kids show?

TESOL Teaching Tip #31 - Uno + Dos = 3

My class this year consisted of 20 students, of which only 1 spoke English only in his household, and even he began his life in a bilingual environment. The other 18 spoke at least one, if not two other languages in their homes, and go to school in English, although they don’t live in an English speaking country. Due to my unique teaching position, I have had some readers ask for tips on teaching English Language Learners. Here’s this week’s Tuesday TESOL Teaching Tip:

ELL Teaching Tip #31: Let Them Count in Their Home Language

In addition to teaching English Language Learners, I also live with an English Language Learner.  English is my husband’s fifth language.  He speaks: Arabic, French, Spanish, Russian and English – in that order.  He can read, write, count, and do math in all of his languages.  He spends 90% of his day in English, thinks and dreams in English.  But, hand him a stack of papers and ask him to count and tell you how many papers there are and he will count the papers in Arabic every time.  Now, after he’s done counting in Arabic, he will tell me the total in English, but his brain automatically counts in Arabic.  He says by counting in Arabic he doesn’t have to think about the numbers and worry about the possibility of miscounting.

Many of our English Language Learners are like my husband.  They learned basic concepts like counting and understanding numbers in their home language before they learned English.  Depending on when they started learning English, they may also have learned basic operations and other math skills in their home language.  Asking students to convert all of their math skills into English is time consuming for you and them, and it increases the possibility of errors.  For this reason, I allow and encourage my students to count, add, subtract, and any do any other math operations they learned in their home language in their home language.  However there are a few things in Math that I ask them to do in English:

1.) Give the answer (first by writing, and eventually orally)

2.)  Read and understand what the problem is asking for

3.)  Explain their thinking

If my students can do these three things in English, I don’t feel that saying “eight x four = thirty two” is more important than saying “ocho veces quatro es igual a treinta y dos”.  In fact, by allowing them to do the work in their home language, students are often able to better understand the vocabulary and concepts that make math in English hard for them.
Do you let your students count in their home language?

Do you enjoy the weekly TESOL Teaching Tips? Would you like to view an hour long presentation on this topic? I recently presented on Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners at the Everything’s Intermediate Expo. Now you can grab the presentation for just $3.95 from Teacher’s Notebook.


Find more TESOL Teaching Tips here, and come back every Tuesday for a new tip!