Hi, my name is Brianda Chavez and I'm studying to become an elementary bilingual teacher, kinder or 1st grade but still not sure. Does anyone have advice on teaching in a bilingual classroom or any resources to help me? Thanks in advance.
Hello, Brianda! I think it is so amazing that you are becoming a bilingual teacher! We most definitely need more since the number of multi-lingual students increases everyday! My major is Elementary Education, but my concentration is in Spanish. I hope to be able to help some of my spanish-speaking students and offer them more resources. I can't offer much advice because I am a pre-service teacher as well, but I can share one of my experiences! I had an experience recently where I had a student that spoke no English. My CT talked to the principal/district, and they were able to provide this student textbooks in Spanish and English. This allowed the student to still get their work done, while also translating back and forth between the two languages! Also, a lot of teacher use google translate if they need to! Another thing I saw that warmed my heart is when our other students try to learn the bilingual students language. Maybe having a spanish word of the week (or even of the day) could help your English only speakers learn to communicate some with you MLL students! Best of luck to you!
Hello Brianda, my advice to you would be to try to keep the classroom active by asking the classroom questions as a group whether some questions in English or some in Spanish depending on the languages they know, the questions should also be based on something that they know, or are familiar with in their own lives. Good luck!
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