English Language Development (ELD) classes are designed to encourage, enhance, and extend the acquisition of the English language through speaking, listening, reading, and writing. While there are ELD state standards, the content is left open so that teachers can tailor lessons to student interests and needs. The hope of all ELD teachers (and all teachers everywhere) is to highly engage students through rich content that students find exciting and interesting. Scholastic News is a consumable news magazine with an online component. Through the online component, teachers are able to level the reading Lexiles for struggling students, have the article read out loud, share videos, play vocabulary games, ask content questions with interactive pictures, etc. plus, the students have a physical copy of the magazine to take home and share with their families. Articles are interesting and range from the scientific (i.e. highlighting specific animals, weather, physical phenomenon, etc.) to the humanities (i.e. current events, holidays, communities, etc.).
English Learners in the elementary grades will benefit from this program. This engaging resource offers leveled language support and provide rich content for group and partner discussions. This content gives ELD teachers topics to build vocabulary and background knowledge to be able to participate in Academic Conversations online or in-person. Every English Learner student will benefit even though we would only need to purchase 160 licenses. This is because we would only need 10 licenses per site per level to have online access for all students. The ELD teachers at TES, KBE and TES have found this resource to be engaging for students and helpful for English acquisition. There are few online resources that are helpful for Elementary ELD instruction, and what we would like to do is provide our ELD teachers at each site access to this physical and digital subscription to enhance their ELD lessons.
Successful use of this curricular resource can be determined by the online engagement with the material and well as in person engagement. The goal for all elementary ELD students in TTUSD is to improve the quality and quantity of academic conversations and that is measured by recording and analyzing students conversations as a PLC (Professional Learning Community). Another important measurement is the students' progress on the ELPAC (English Learner Proficiency Assessments for California.) We would expect the use of the speaking listening reading and writing activities to help improve EL student outcomes on these State assessments.
The great news is that the ELD teachers are very familiar with this resource and feel confident in using it to maximize language learning. Each ELD coordinator would have online access to thousands of digital resources and archived issues of Scholastic News. This will make it easy for teachers to curate thematic units which we know to be especially effective for language acquisition.
This would be a shared grant for all district English learners at the elementary level. This team of ELD teachers meets regularly in their PLC and would use that time for planning units in common and reflection around teaching with this resource online and/or in person.
We do not have another funding source at this time, but if there are District EL funds available at the end of the school year, we could possibly apply some of those funds.