Silver Linings

Teaching Language Support-History has been so rewarding this year. This class has brought me back to being a first year teacher--the highs, lows, uncertainty, and the rewards of working with students learning English, Social Studies content, and American school at the same time. It's also been, as I've previously stated, a perfect mix of my two content area strengths: History and foreign language instruction, even though the foreign language is English, not German. (I do have a German student, though! It's been nice to practice my German when I have clarified concepts with her.)

I've had one more professional bucket list want that I can finally check off of my list--I am part of a teaching team this year. Our Language Support students are together for English, Science, and Social Studies classes every day. The three of us teachers, along with our amazing Parapro, have gained so much momentum this year creating cross-curricular units for our students. The online learning portion of our year has us providing more and more opportunities for our students to benefit from interwoven instruction.

I have always wanted to be on a teaching team. I viewed the success of teachers having the same students a few times in my school when attempts at teaming with a majority of students occurred. I am so happy to say that I've been able to provide a true community with my fellow team teachers this year. It's especially poignant that the students we are working with are among the most vulnerable in our building. They have left their old world to enter a completely new environment. We can reinforce the learning in one class to another through teaming and help to cement their knowledge.

Our last unit is about natural disasters. Students have learned about volcanoes for the past two weeks in Science class. Our English teacher is working on, among other topics, cause and effect with the students, relating it to volcanoes. I have pulled from Ancient Civilizations (Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius) and the modern eruption of Mount Kilauea in Hawaii. (For fun we examined the myth of the creation of the Hawaiian Islands with the Pixar move short "Lava".) This week we started to study hurricanes and my students studied the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. Hurricane Katrina is next week's focus.

We run class as a team once a week. During this time we focus on talking to one another, practicing social language and building community the way we have all year. We also review the learning from the week and provide a mini lesson to reinforce the learning.

Tomorrow is our next meeting. I have to be honest, I get so happy waiting for our students to log on and see their faces! We will review and preview our second week of hurricane activities.

The last weeks of school will focus on earthquakes. The unit will culminate when students create safety posters using FEMA guidelines. This will reinforce the role government plays in keeping its citizens safe. Students will use vocabulary and terms from all three content areas to demonstrate understanding of our work.

This class has been a silver lining in the midst of online teaching.