Language Arts and Love: Learning Together in the Bronx

Funded Aug 26, 2017

When I first started teaching at Dewitt Clinton, I knew the school had a high population of English Language Learners, but I never could have predicted that some of my classes would be over 70% English Language Learners. Many of my students have been in the United States for less than five years, and some, less than five months. With students who come to me in high school and who speak so little English, everything is a challenge. Things that may seem simple to you and I become almost insurmountable language obstacles, and so it becomes imperative that these students have every supply that they could possibly need, because they are working an uphill language battle.

To this end, the whiteboards, the document camera, and the chart paper immediately became assets in our classroom. Having the language learners be able to teach each other with the whiteboards, try out words and spellings without fear of making a mistake by writing them on paper, and being able to complete whole class activities without fear of being singled out because they wrote something incorrectly. I love that whenever I'm working in a small group with language learners, I can just reach for the whiteboards, and the students immediately know that this is a resource they don't get in other classes. Even things like the document camera, allowing students to be vulnerable and project their own work for the rest of the class to see, the chart paper, which allows students to get out of their seat and complete gallery walks, station activities, and more visual representation of their thoughts, and the synonym posters which we reference daily all make the classroom feel more like a home, which is important when the students spend so much time in it.

In terms of next steps, having been in the classroom for almost four months now, I can see that the most high leverage supplies are definitely chart paper (which is very expensive, so our school rarely orders it), and graphic novels (which really help the language learners by giving them texts on grade level, but with visuals to assist in their comprehension). As of right now, we're running low on chart paper, and and we're beginning to read the graphic novella version of Kafka's Metamorphosis, which should be exciting, but since we only have about 10 copies of the book, students have to share when they read in class. We would love to have class sets and back-ups of essential supplies like chart paper and books, but for now, the supplies we revived really made what would have been a hectic start for a first year teacher a lot more smooth, for both my students and I.”

With gratitude,

Ms. Mendez