Strengthening Our Core

Near the end of May, Paul and I got to attend a day long workshop presented by our second language-special ed hero, Katie Arnett!!! We actually got to talk to her live and in person!!! And she was AMAZING!!!! We learned sooo much in one day I wish we could have met her at the beginning of our project instead of the end, but it was an AWESOME way to wind our project up!  To make the day even better (if that was even possible!) as part of our project, we were able to bring the FSL-SERT team from Queen Elizabeth PS with us too! Teri Smart and Tanya Campbell seemed to enjoy the day as much as we did, and Tanya was taking notes at least as fast as I was.  A few interesting / thought-provoking bits from my notes include: - We were referring to ULAs as "you ell ay's" throughout our project, but Katy calls them "Oo la's" ... which sounds way more 'Oo la la' and fun to me! 😊 - We speak 180 words per minute. In a second language classroom we tend to

For the Action Research part of our project, I chose to focus on six of the Universal Language Actions (ULAs) in Katy Arnett and Renée Bourgoin’s book, "Access for Success: Making Inclusion Work for Language Learners". (You can find the list of ULAs here ) Most of them were things I was already doing, but for the project I chose to be more intentional about them, planning ahead instead of using them on the fly. Here are my reflections on my experience with each one ... ULA Action 1.5 Providing wait time when presenting new information, after asking a question, or before inviting learners to start a task  This action was a hard task for myself to get over. I only have 30 minutes in the classroom which can be a barrier itself to get started. I did make myself flexible by allowing the students that needed time to sit out for short period and observe. One particular student in class needs time to watch the activity before he can join in, and that is ok because he k