Teaching Prepositions to Elementary English Learners

I know most of us have English learners in our classrooms, but how many of you have to teach English Language Development (ELD) or ESL everyday?

In California, we need to teach 30-45 minutes of ELD daily.  In actuality, because we have a minimum day every Friday, we teach ELD four days a week and some grade levels do an extended time three days a week.

The purpose of this time is to group students by their English proficiency level and teach them the grammatical forms, language (sentence structure), and vocabulary at their level.  We’re a smaller school, so we generally have three teachers at each grade level.  In second grade, one of us has the Beginning, Early Intermediate, Intermediate students, another has Intermediate and Early Advanced, and the other teacher has our Advanced and English Only (EO) students.

I have the lowest group with the widest range.  Honestly, the range is all about the numbers.  We have two beginning students, but we couldn’t stack the intermediate or EO classes with more students.  In my group, with the range, I also have students who are not only lower in their English levels, but academically as well, so they’ve needed a lot of support and scaffolding.

Our ELD time is mainly focused on oral production and practice with a writing application at the end of the week.  Since the beginning of this school year, I’ve struggled with how to do the written application task and make it work for my students’ English and academic levels.  It needed to be a real-world application where the students could apply the language they had learned during the week.  I didn’t want it to be forced or “fake” language.

I finally figured it out two weeks ago.

At the end of each “cycle”, which is generally four days of instruction, I’ll give them a worksheet with a situation on it.  Students will draw a picture and write sentences about their picture, using the sentence frames from the week.  The sentence construction charts and vocabulary are on display so they can reference them, but students need to construct the sentences on their own.

This particular week focused on prepositions and household objects.  The task was to :

Pretend that you are moving to a new house.  People are helping you move and you need to tell them exactly where to put your furniture.

Of course, students are expected to use the language they have been taught during the week.

The next couple weeks of instruction are about weather and activities you might do during each season.  My application tasks are:

• Pretend that it is spring (summer, fall, winter).  What month is it?  What is the weather like? What do you usually do during that month?
• Pretend that it is spring (summer, fall, winter).  What do you wear during that season?

One of the weeks is asking someone for help finding something, so I’ve created a comic where students can draw and write the dialogue.  The focus, of course, is on the language, not the art.