ELL Day

This was a really interesting experience for me. I had very limited experience with any ELL students. The only experience that I'd had was with one of my friends in high school who came to the United States from China with limited English. After 8 years here her mother still does not speak any English.

There were quite a few challenges with this lesson. I found that in some of the groups we had students who knew a ton about circles and got the concepts very quickly while in the same group students were not understanding the material. We also did not have enough activities planned for our 25 minute time frame. This meant that we were able to have a little more discussion with the first group at the end about their experience which was good. However, it also meant that in the future groups we tended to try and stretch activities which meant that students were getting more easily distracted by the other activities occurring in the room. I think we also could have helped to combat students being distracted by including a few more activities that involved the students doing hands on activities.

We also found that we had struggles with the student who was visually impaired. This was something we were completely unprepared for. I didn't have a ton of interaction with this student because she sat at the other end of the table from me but when my team teachers were describing their activities I tried to observe how she was reacting to the activities. It seemed that she was uncomfortable and feeling left out. However, it appeared that she didn't want a lot of the assistance that our group was offering her. I think that could have been because she felt like she was being singled out. I feel like I would feel that way if I was in her situation.

Students really liked our space activity. They liked that we used Geogebra in a field that wasn't a math class. One of them actually said on their exit ticket that they want to "take science classes like to try to do some to show my teachers." I thought it was awesome that they wanted to take it home and show the program to their teachers. We also had a student respond to the question "was using the Geogebra program helpful?" with "it was helpful because now I can do by myself." I feel like this is a starfish moment, to steal a quote from practicum, as a teacher because we got to see that students went from not knowing the material at all to feeling like that can actually use it and learn from it on their own.

Overall I felt like this experience went well. There were a few things that could have been changed to make it run smoother or help students feel more comfortable in the center but it still was an amazing learning experience.