Weekly ELD Strategy #5

​This week’s ELD strategy is brought to you by the Blue Team at Fuller Middle School.

Strategy 5: Scaffold Participation with Sentence starters for Clarification

In a meeting last week, they showed me this desktop anchor chart they use to help scaffold student participation and self-advocacy, and I asked if I could share it as my weekly strategy.

In the early days, months, and years of being integrated into US schools or mainstream English classes, ELs can have a very high affect filter, which keeps them from participating in class, and most importantly, asking for help when they don’t understand. In order to combat and support this silent period, the Blue Team developed these sentence starters to help students be able to have the vocabulary necessary to ask for clarification during a lesson.

This is little chart students can keep on their desk and reference it whenever they need it. The Blue Team provided a copy for every desk, and made it even more durable by slipping the sheet into a recycled name tag from the Keefe Field Trips last year.

I encourage you and your teams to think about what academic language is necessary in your classes, and how you can support this production from your ELs.

Thank you Blue Team, for sharing this great strategy!

**As always, all of the ELD Weekly Strategies can be found here, for your reference. If you have any questions about this ELD strategy or any other strategy, please let me know.