COMMON CORE VIDEOS for ELA and MATH FOR ELEMENTARY

As promised, here are the COMMON CORE ELA/MATH STANDARDS for elementary schools.  The video starts off with kindergarten where higher thinking skills are woven into every lesson.  Students must support, explain, defend any answer they come up with.   Seeing students explaining the processes they went through to arrive at an answer is inspirational to view.

As you study the standards, notice the progression of skills through 5th.  What is started in kindergarten is  strengthened, broadened, added to, etc, through high school.   At this young age, students are not only responding in complete sentences, but responding in complete sentences using academic language!  In other clips of other grades, you see students interacting with informational text (50% of reading must be this in elementary school).  Teachers set them up to be successful with regular checks for understanding, allow them time to fully understand the concepts, incorporate lots of partner work, and release them slowly to independent work.

My major concern with the new standards was how ELLs will be supported and in one of the classes on the video, the teacher conducted a support lesson for her students within her class.  This approach will work if  teachers, who are not that experienced with teaching ELLs, are given the support or teaching tools to successfully deliver highly effective instruction to these students along with other students with special needs or struggle in learning in general within their mainstream classes.

It is a great time to be an educator.  Though it is a period of change, it is one where we will be preparing our students, regardless of age, to be successful in life at whatever they choose to do.  I will share middle school later this week:)

IMPLEMENTATION OF COMMON CORE ELA AND MATH IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS

Denise

ELL TEACHER PROS