Introduction



Welcome to my Wikispace. My name is Ms. M. Sarli. I have been teaching for 6 years now in the south suburbs of Chicago, IL. I received my bachelor degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and my master degree from Chicago State University. I am currently still at Chicago State University taking courses to obtain an ESL endorsement. I am currently a first year Bilingual Kindergarten with 25 students, teaching in a small school consisting of only 125 Kindergarten students.(125 Kindergarten students may not seem like a lot but they can get pretty noisy at school).

In my Wikispace, I have provided you with definitions of the different approaches and activities that will be useful to your classroom as many of them have been valuable in my own Bilingual Kindergarten classroom. In my Wikispace, I have identified 6 important approaches that can be implemented in your ESL classroom. Within each approach, I have defined each term with an overview of how each approach should look like in the classroom, the values and challenges of each approach, and a lesson plan example of each approach. I have also included 2 more activities for 12 different categories that can be implemented in your classroom as well. Each category contains an introduction, my rationale of choosing the particular activity, a brief comment on where I found these activities, the website where you can find the activity (some do not contain a site but the directions are stated), and my experience for the activity.

This ESL toolkit is valuable to me because it gives me a better understanding of how I can assist my young second language learners. By creating this Wikispace, I not only learned about different teaching approaches it also taught me how to implement them in the classroom. I now have more of a variety of teaching approaches which will allow me to see which of these new approaches my students will respond best too. I have also found many great activities that I can try throughout the rest of this school year. I feel that the activities I provided will help my students become proficient in their second language. My students may still be very young but if I can provide them with appropriate lessons/activities for them that will promote their second language, in the future they should be successful in their first and second language.

I hope that other teachers and future teachers find my Wikispace helpful. I know that when I first started teaching I was always on-line looking for different teachers' webpages to find appropriate activities for my young ESL students. I would find many lesson plans and activities but I did not feel that many were geared to ESL learners. I feel that through the Wikispaces we are creating, we can help each other find appropriate approaches and activities we can put into practice. I believe that new teachers will surely benefit from these activities and hopefully help ease them to an easier first year of teaching.