I began my ELL teaching career thirteen years ago working with pre-literate Hmong refugees. Since that time, however, I haven’t had a student who was not literate in their home language – until this year.
This obviously creates many challenge, including the fact that most online ELL resources require some degree of literacy.
Here are a few online resources that seem to have been helpful and accessible to my student – let me know if you have other suggestions:
Raz-Kids (paid subscription required)
Online TPR Exercises by Henny Jellema
Lyrics2Learn is a music video program to teach early readers. It feels to me something like a StarFall (the famous site for early readers) put to music. You can create a virtual classroom with it, and can try it out for a month. Then you have to pay $150 per year (you can also pay a monthly charge, instead). I’ve been having a few of my lowest English-proficient and least engaged Beginning ELLs use it, and it seems to be going well.
I’m adding this list to The Best Online Resources For Teachers of Pre-Literate ELL’s.
Hi Larry,
Gif Lingua is still “under the radar” and in soft launch until some more basic functionality is in place. Still, it is meant as a full literacy solution. Try Level 1. Loads of alphabet readers, dolch lists and basic readers. Here is an example. http://book.giflingua.com/book/531-dolch-nouns-5
Hi Larry,
I came across your blog by having to research educational blogs in my masters program. I did a general education search and yours was one of the top ten listed. I have recently come back to teaching from taking an absence of eleven years to raise my two daughters. So much has changed: NCLB to CCSS, floppy disks to the cloud and everything technology related – so much to learn!
I had never followed or read many blogs, so I was delighted to click on yours and see all of the resources you have to offer. I teach second grade in South Orange County, CA and the majority of my students are English Language Learners. I appreciate all that you have accomplished with this site and all the resource links.
My school does not adopted an ELD program, but our school site has used More Starfall (an upgraded paid subscription) with great success.
Happy to have found your site and will be checking in frequently.