At the beginning of January I started to transition the dozen or so kids that are still reading the Houghton Mifflin Lectura series in Spanish into English. We started with the Visualizing and Verbalizing structure words that we had been doing for writing and I modeled the English every other day. Then at the end of January, at the beginning of the second semester, I quit the daily writing. Now we read the story from the basal in Spanish and discuss the meaning of words and follow the questioning strategies that are in the teacher's manual and that's pretty much all the Spanish they will get until we have read the story twice and I ask them to write a journal entry about the story or something the story made them think about.
Then the other half of their time we are reading English from the Early Success series. I chose the first level so that they could hear the rhythm and rhyme. On Fridays and Mondays all year, they have been doing Zip Zoom and have "graduated" to RAZ kids. Most of the kids have finished level 3 of Zip Zoom by second grade and are ready. I feel pressured to exit kids from Spanish if they can read and understand well so that they can get started with the dominant culture's language. What I find is that the students that aren't exited are often the ones that have some kind of learning issue. They don't hear all the sounds in Spanish (L1=first language) which is completely phonetic, and then they end up struggling in English (L2=second language) too, because they don't hear all the sounds in this language, either.
For intervention for the kindergarteners, (groups of five or six) I have adopted the practice of using little plastic toys that they name. I use about a dozen items that sit on the desk in front of me. I have plastic tiles that I touch (kids are facing me, so I go right to left) as I say the sounds in the words. In the beginning after I say all the sounds, if I don't get any response as to which item I might have said, I go back and group the tiles in the syllables. I have tried a number of different ways to respond and I like to switch it up. The first time I did it, I allowed the students that thought they knew to say it. Then I started handing out the plastic toys and if they had two toys they couldn't say the word anymore. For a couple of weeks now, I have been trying another response so that they don't just "shout out" the answer, I have them listen to the sounds and put their thumbs up if they think they know the word, I count to three and they say the word in a chorus. I see who is leading and following. It is the same kids that didn't get two toys right away. The game is that with five year olds, someone always forgets and blurts out the answer, so I put the toy back in the bucket for "me" and if no one shouts out, "they" get the toys in front of them.
If you read this and you think you would try something that has worked for me, please write me a message. I am fairly certain, I am mostly writing this to myself and processing what I have done that seems to be fun and working too.
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