WELCOME

Welcome to the San Juan Adult Ed ESL Teachers' Blog

Hi! I'm glad you found this. We are hoping that this format will allow us to share ideas even though we are spread out across several campuses. Please read posts and make comments.

Resolutions and Goal Setting

Welcome to a New Year! 

The new year is a traditional time for us to write resolutions. There are many ways of sharing this with our students. If you wrote goals at the beginning of the year, have the students pull them out and look at them, check how they are going and see if they want to revise them. If they didn't write them at the beginning of the year, this is the perfect opportunity to have your students write some and focus on learning again after the holidays. I've included links here on SMART goal and ESL goal writing:

Links to SMART goal setting:
https://thebestticher.wordpress.com/2017/01/09/goal-setting-with-students/
http://elt-connect.com/goal-setting/

ESL Goal setting...
This is from a  workshop I attended many years ago and I still use these or pieces of these in my goal setting lessons:
http://www.sdce.edu/assets/001/5106.pdf
http://www.sdce.edu/assets/001/5107.pdf
http://www.sdce.edu/assets/001/5108.pdf

You can have the students write their goals on a Google Doc and create a Google Sheet to track their progress.

Ideas for the winter holiday season

What are some ideas you have for sharing the winter season with your students? 

I usually briefly introduce all the winter holidays (Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Solstice, New Year's) and let them share about their holiday traditions. I like to share with my students' traditions from my family and explain the uniqueness of family traditions within the holidays. I sometimes share recipes (especially cookies).

There are lots of videos on holidays. I often use: https://www.elcivics.com/hanukkah-lesson-1.html

Of course, there are the holiday parties with winter songs, too. I find they really like to know the words to the popular seasonal songs, especially if they have children, so I often teach several of the common songs.

This year, if I was in the classroom, I was thinking about making construction paper ornament cutouts and having students write wishes on them and then put them on a paper tree on a bulletin board or on an actual tree. I think this would let them participate in the holidays in a non-religious way (some of you may disagree).

What are you doing or what have you done?