 It's so good to see you guys. Agreed, especially in this physical distancing time any communication is great. I'm telling you, it's just something else. It's not quite the same because when I handle snacks, there's just not the same. Yeah, that's true. Okay. Right, for sure. Okay, it's officially 4pm. So as we are waiting for a few more to join us, I'm going to welcome you all to the boosting achievement deep dive book study day three. And today we are joined by Carol Salva. Before we start, I would like to acknowledge that we are on 3d6 territory, the traditional meeting grounds gathering place and traveling route to the Cree, Soto Blackfoot, Métis Denae and Nacoda Sioux. We acknowledge the many First Nations Métis and Inuit, whose footsteps have marked these lands for centuries. Alright, so we have a very exciting day today because we are joined by Carol Salva and we wanted to ensure that after I introduce Carol, that we just go around and introduce ourselves so we know who is joining us today. So Carol is an educational consultant and the co-author of boosting achievement, reaching students with interrupted or minimal education. Carol has been with the SEDLIS educational team for two years and Carol's a former elementary educator and has recently taught newcomer English language development in both high school and in middle school. Carol's engaging and motivating presentation style serves as a model for sheltering instruction in the classroom and she continuously receives very positive feedback and definitely from my cohorts in Alberta and praise for participants who appreciate her practical approach to supporting all English language learners and all students. Alright, so welcome Carol. Thank you, that was very kind. Okay, she's in a full day of webinar so we're actually lucky to have her join us today. So we will just go around and ask everyone to introduce themselves and if you could just state your first and last name and your school district please. So we'll start with Lynn. Oh, hello. So Lynn Frugia, Edmonton Public Schools. Great, thank you, Katarina. I'm Katarina Laser, I'm with Elk Island Catholic Schools and I'm an ESL instructional coach. Thanks, Roxanne. You'll have to unmute your mic please. Hi. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Roxanne Wibenga, I'm with Edmonton Public Schools as well and I'm currently teaching a group of ELLs who are new to Canada and arrived in October. I believe it was and so I have them in a sheltered classroom. Perfect. Thanks, Roxanne and Mary. Can you hear me okay? Yes, we sure can. Now, can you see me? No, we can't. We see, I think it looks like something gray. Okay. So let me just play around with it because I'm, I'm very used to Google Hangout but not to zoom. Okay. So just bear with me but Mary Stewart, Parkland School Division, Spurs Grove Comps of High School. Perfect, thank you. And now we'll go to Stephanie. Okay. Yeah, so I missed the little icon on the bottom that said join audio. Yeah, so I'm a ESL consultant with Elk Island Public Schools and yeah, I don't, what was the rest of your question? Oh, that was it. Okay. I understand Stephanie. It's the end of the day. Okay, Kim. Kim, go ahead. Oh, she must have stepped away. So Kim Tacklebury is the literacy consultant for the Calgary Regional Consortium. And next we'll go to Harmony. Hi, Harmony. Hi, Harmony Ryan with Edmonton Public School. And I am an ESL consultant. Perfect. Thanks Harmony. Nice of you to join us today. And then now we will go to Yvonne. Hi everyone. Yvonne Sting. I'm the literacy and ELL consultant with Greater St. Albert Catholic Schools. Perfect. Thanks. Welcome. And thanks for joining us. I think that's it for today. So we will start off with an activating activity. And so Christine Kwong is also our ed tech consultant. Who is helping facilitate today. And so in a couple of minutes, you are going to be going into a randomized breakout room. And so you won't have access to the slides. So if you have a look, we are going to do what's called the circle of viewpoints thinking routine just to get our brains primed. And so what we'd like to do is to think about learning, but not from a teacher perspective, but from the learning at, I'm thinking of learning at home from the viewpoint of either an ELL student or an ELL parent. So you will be in a group of about three people per group. So perhaps one of you could take on the student and two of you could take on the parents or vice versa. And so within your group, depending on which perspective you are choosing, you're going to talk about something that you would think from their perspective. So you would try to imagine from the ELL students perspective. What do they think something that they would think about about their learning at home situation? And likewise, the parent would echo perspective would echo the same thing. And then after everyone has shared their, I think perspective, then you would articulate one question that you would have about either the viewpoint that you adopted or the one that someone else in your group has expressed. So the opposite viewpoint. Does anyone have any questions about the thinking routine? Once you're in the breakout rooms, you'll have to join it, but you won't have access to the slide. So I just want to make sure everyone is clear about the instructions. Okay. So Christine, if you could please populate everyone into a breakout room of three people, please. And then you'll have one group of four then, right? So in total, sure, that'd be great. Okay. So you all will see something on your screen asking you to go into a breakout room. And then Susan, how, how many minutes or are you going to let me know through text message when you want me to bring them back. I'll text you. Okay. And so then once Susan gives me the, okay, I will call you back from that breakout room. It'll give you about 60 seconds to wrap up your conversations. And then it'll kick you back into the room if you haven't gone back already on your own. Okay. Thanks, Christine. Hi, ma'am. Christine, is everyone back in the room? Two people still coming back. Okay. Just let me know because I can't see the full screen. I think they're back now. Okay. Great. Okay. Thanks. Okay. Welcome back everyone. So I'm just going to go around and we're just going to share what question emerged from your discussion. So, um, so you had to assume the role of either a ELL student or a parent and articulate, I think statement. And so the question after hearing everyone's I think statement was how, um, how often does the teacher have a face to face meeting with students online to, in order to provide clarity for ELL students? I'll pass it on next to Lynn. Um, did we get to this part? Um, so I was a student. So our parent, um, I work all day and I can't help my child. I, I, how do I do that if I'm not there? Okay. Lynn, do you want to pick the next participant? Oh, sure. Roxanne. Thanks, Lynn. I took on the perspective of a student. Um, but my question was how can we support? How can we best support students in their learning now? Okay. Roxanne, do you want to pick the next person to speak? Uh, who do I see? Okay. I took on the perspective of a parent. And my question was, uh, I need help to learn how to navigate through this. Where can I go to get help? And will the school help me as a parent? Okay. Mary, do you want to pick the next participant to speak, please? Sure. Harmony. Okay. Hi. So, um, you know, I was really considering myself as the younger student. And as, you know, a younger student, I don't even know how to access any kind of technology. I need my, I need my parents there to support me. And do they know how to help with that? Okay. Thanks. Harmony, do you want to pick the next speaker? Sure. Let's go with, um, Stephanie. So I was the parent and, um, So I guess one of my concerns is I can't understand all the instructions that the teacher is giving me. So are for my students. So I have, I don't know how to support my child. Okay. Okay. Thanks. And Stephanie, do you like to pick to go next? Uh, Kim. Oh, I think. Kim might be just listening in. Oh, Caterina. So I was from the perspective of the parent and my question was, am I doing enough to support my, my child? And then consequently to that, is there something else in my life that I'm dealing with that. Um, takes me away from being able to help. So did I lose a job? Am I able to still provide for my family? Um, do I know somebody that's sick or somebody in my family's sick or am I sick? And so I think that there's a lot of questioning, but it's a lot of just, can I make sure my family is okay. Okay. Thanks. And I pass it on to Carol. I, I was the perspective of the student and the first thing that came to mind was I'm nervous and wondering if I'm doing everything I'm supposed to be doing. I'm not quite sure if I, if I know all of my assignments are done properly or if I'm even doing all of them. Right. Cause you don't have the reassurance of a daily, of a teacher with the face to face. I'm just not, I'm just nervous if there's a language barrier. I'm just not a hundred percent certain. Right. Absolutely. Okay. So that activity was intended to just get you thinking out of the educators mindset and looking at things from a different perspective. And so at the end of the session, we will have a chance to kind of explore some of the strategies that we're already doing in our districts. But for now, because we have Carol until four 55, we're going to go into looking at the questions that were posed from our boosting achievement book study. And so we have recorded the questions, but Carol, did you want to maybe speak to what you had put down in the beginning box first? Sure. Did you want to screen share? And I can show what I, some of the, some of the questions and the ways that I answered them. Oh, sure. Can you not see? No, we can't. Not right now, or I'm happy to screen share and I can go to it. Okay. Oh, I forgot that when I went out of the, into the breakout room, it stopped my screen share. Yeah. And thanks for everybody who submitted questions ahead of time. That makes it really helpful. So, because this is just such a limited time together. I, the document that you guys used to document some of your questions, I just started by giving you some links to things that people are using right now. For other questions. So the first thing is my blog and look under podcast. And there are many shows that speak directly to the questions that you guys had. So other questions that come up, you might go through the list of the 72 shows that we've done so far. And there might be one there because the shows are all about newcomers and English learners. It's specifically students who either have limited education or new to the country and new to your content areas and such. So the other thing is that my, the company that I work for, sideless education, if you go to sidelesseducation.com, we're doing free webinars right now that have to do with distance learning and English learners in mind. They're not specifically only for English learners, but we don't do anything without the English learner in mind. So today it was social studies and compelling input. And these are 30 minute webinars that are very high. Impact. They're being received really, really well. There was a math one on Friday. So if you miss them, they're on our website. You don't have to sign in or anything. They're there streaming. They streamed YouTube. So you'll find them there. The other thing I have coming up on May 6th is with Kahooch. That's the next live webinar I'm doing. And it's about using Kahoot for English learners with distance learning. And they're about to load that onto their website, but that's the Kahoot website for webinars right now. So that's about the kids that you're teaching. That's about the kids that we're talking about and how we can use something like Kahoot for distance learning. So I just wanted to start with that of where you can get some more information. So here in Stephanie's question, I'm going to just go through these questions quickly because I actually put links in here. So Stephanie's question, and it's a great question in the book, I talk about going over content and language objectives. And I do that anytime I go anywhere online or in person. And her question is such a good question is that we, we might understand how important the content and the language objective is for our English learners, but how can we help content teachers see the value in it? They might not realize the benefit. And I want to lift up content teachers. These people are very, very busy just like us. Everybody is. And so where our job could be to help them see what is the benefit for all students. So I have here a slide that is an example of what I would do in a training, but really I'm doing this in online training. If I have a whiteboard, I'm doing it on the whiteboard in my classroom or in my virtual classroom. I'm doing it on a screen like this. So what I, what I do in the training, when I have content teachers or ESL teachers is I explained the research behind teacher clarity, having teacher clear goals and reflection and evaluation activities. So if you'll notice, none of those have to do with English learners. Those are effect sizes from John Hattie's work and anything over a point four shows to have a significant positive effect on learning, learning, right? So if you do an exit ticket or a ticket out of the room, the kids are going to have to reflect. And if you talk about that at the beginning, well now you're framing your lesson and you're being a lot more clear about the goals. And so we're clit, we're, we're, these have a bigger effect than small class sizes. These have a bigger effect than homework. You know, so I think this speaks a lot to content teachers when we tell them what I'm asking you to do. Sure. I'm running my finger under it because our English learners benefit from that. And English learners need a laser focus on how to be successful today. But all of your kids are going to achieve more according to very well regarded research right now in the field. So that's what I would offer you for trying to help content teachers do some things that are good for all kids like content and language objectives. Could you go down a little bit and, and I include that slide for you guys in case anybody's doing any professional development. I have the slide there you can use. So Megan, Megan asked in the book, I talk about choral reading. And when I'm talking about choral reading, I'm saying like, guys, this is what we're going to do today. Listen to me first. It sounds like today we will determine the difference between blah, blah, blah. Okay. Now let's all say it together. And they read it with me. You can turn off your mics in a, in a virtual classroom, but in the regular classroom, we're reading all together. And that is a low stress way to have students get sight words and phonetics and practice oral language. And just a lot of nice things happen when you read together in a content class. I'm going to do that maybe with my objectives, maybe just with some sentence frames. But if the ESL classroom, I'm going to do it all the time, all the time, because you watched me do there was an I do, we do for reading. And then in a minute, I might go ask you to read it to somebody else or read what you can. So then that would be I do, we do, you do for reading. So Megan's question is a great question. She's saying you talk about it in the lower, but I see it in the lower grade levels, but what does this look like in high school? And I'm here to tell you, Megan, I've done it in elementary, but only because I consult in elementary now. I've done this all these years in high school and middle school. So what I want to point you to in the, in here is my blog, I have videos and podcasts, and I have a video of me doing it with high school students. And those high school students didn't come in like in each other. They didn't come in knowing each other. They're completely different kids. It's just a regular classroom, right? You have to build an environment where people feel comfortable sharing in low stress ways. So it's about routines, routines, routines. So you can watch the video, but I will, I will tell you that that video includes a non-example and an example because I was constantly filming myself that last year of high school and there was a time that I did it, but it didn't go very well at all. And instead of deleting that video, I included it and I voice over it and I show you what my missteps are and why it's not going well. And then I come back the next day and I do it better. So you have an example and a non-example. And that's in, yeah, it's embarrassing, but I think we can all learn from that. So the link is right there. Another thing I would tell you, Megan, is if you're the math teacher, again, you might just do your objectives. So I also included a video of a math teacher and all she reads poorly are the objectives because no kids in her class, even the ones born here, are saying circumference of circles like a mathematician and bust out with that when they're speaking. So she takes the first few seconds of class to make sure everybody can say the words and the way that I'm going to have you speak today. And so you can watch her do that and listen to her reflections about how powerful it is for her middle school kids. So then we can go down. Okay. Sherri asked, can you discuss the difference between learning a language and acquiring a language in a little bit more depth? So there are a few pages in the book and this isn't, you know, this isn't just my opinion. I'm getting this from the research, Steven Crashin's research about language acquisition. And when we talk about learning a language or learning about a language versus acquiring a language, what we're talking about is I could start with alphabet, right? You come into my classroom. You've never spoken English before. I can show you how to conjugate verbs. I can teach you the alphabet and different things, but that's not helping you acquire a language. That's teaching you about a language. And if you took a foreign language in high school and you learned how to conjugate those verbs that year, and you don't speak that language right now, that's what happened. You learned about a language. I can tell you all about a language and not be able to speak that language because I didn't acquire it. So the only way to acquire a language, to get it is to listen, speak, read and write that language. That's how we start to own it. And that's the only way a baby does with their first language. They listen, they listen, then they start trying. It's not quite right. And eventually you do more and more of it. So we just want to provide more low stress opportunity, low stress opportunities for kids to speak English. That was one right there. Hey, I'm going to say it first. Now watch when I say it. Now you say it with me. You might be thinking, well, they can't read that yet. They can't read it yet today. And who knows how much they can read because 50% of everything are these tiny little sight words. And every single day that kid understands more English. So who's to say if I'm touching which words he can and can't read, but we know if you got those kids in October by now, they have a lot more listening comprehension than they had in October. And if I'd given them one sentence every day to read, to read with me to read to somebody else, because it's good for everybody, they would have acquired a lot of reading comprehension, just reading, even if it's just little sight words, not comprehension, but ability to read phonetics, sight words and things like that. So I guess sight and learning about a language verse. It's not that there's not a place for it. We have to learn how to conjugate verbs. We have to learn to spell. We have to learn all of that. But it's the end of the writing process as we get older. And it's, it doesn't go very well if the kid doesn't own very much of that language. So we want to do both and we want to focus on language acquisition at first. Hope that makes sense. And if not, tag me on Twitter. And I'll send you some more stuff about that because that's Steven Crashin's research. So Sherry also, or a different Sherry, maybe asked about pull out versus push in for students that have interruptions in education. So just my thoughts on that. And my thoughts on pull out versus push in for these children are the same that they are for any child. It's just the same. Don't take them out of anything meaningful. Language arts, even when I don't speak your language is meaningful. It's meaningful for everybody in the classroom. That child can talk about author's purpose. They can talk about the main idea. They can talk about the setting. They can talk about the plot. They can talk about everything that the other kids can talk about before they can independently read it. Even before they have the language for it. Because there are so many standards that don't require that I read it physically by myself. So I don't want to take them out of anything that the other kids are learning. In fact, one of the fastest ways to close their gaps is to include them meaningfully. So what I would do instead, I mean small group is great. If you're doing, you know, if you have a time for small group, you can have a classroom. You can have a classroom. You can have a classroom. And these are not the only kids who could benefit for some extra small group time. So whatever is happening in the classroom when they're small group, I would prefer these kids stay with their class and have that small group time in there. That's just my, that's just a perfect world, right? And if you're going to be supporting students, I would support them in the classroom so that they can benefit from everything going on in the classroom. And I would, I would support the more I freaked out about how, how much they missed, you know, how old they are. And they've missed all of this. And really what we have to remember is the older the student is, the more capacity they have to partner with us. So you can partner with these kids and show them how a person learns to read and write. And a lot of it you don't have to do with me. I should, it's an equity piece, right? So I need to change my instruction so that it's not so difficult for them. It shouldn't be. We're making it more difficult than it needs to be for them. But I also need to show them how a person acquires language. I need to understand balance literacy enough to be able to tell them how they're going to get phonetics and how we are going to do some phonetics lessons later. But right now you can get a lot of sight words and it's not just phonetics, it's whole language. And so if that's something that you don't understand well, like I didn't understand well, there are two different shows, one for the teacher, one video and one for how you help the kids understand it. And both of those are linked on my blog as well under podcasts around episode 6061. Another great thing like news and levels. This is for older kids because it's scaffolded already for them. I love news ELA and I know a lot of you guys use news ELA. It's a website that's free for teachers. It levels text. The problem is when the kids not with me, they can't use, they can't use things that I have to give them. So I want to train kids with things like news and levels. And also your country has some fantastic resources of high low readers that have been developed. That we can send you guys that they can read online. But news and levels reads it out loud to them and scaffolds it down. And if they leave your district, they can access it anywhere they are in the world to help them understand it. And that's a great choice. There's a ton of choice in it. They can choose any article and do this. And so you get a lot more engagement when the kid gets to pick what they want to read. So a combination of teaching the kid how you're going to learn to read and then flooding them with high interest stuff like that. But again, that's for older readers because the news is scary sometimes for little kids. So I think that's a great choice. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We included those links. How do we best support ELLs during this time of turmoil and tribulation? I want to honor this. This is a big question. I think there's more and more answers for this every day. What I would point you to my current thinking on this. I just wrote an article, a commentary for education week. I wrote an article for education week. I was specifically asking about refugees and kids who just came who don't have access to technology or maybe don't understand how to use the technology. And we offered our best tips. It's Taun Nguyen, Sarah Saeed and me. And we wrote that article with a bunch of action items for education week. If you don't have a subscription to education week, you can go to my blog. I have a lot of suggestions. I want to do a quick review of that. I need permission to reprint on my blog. So everything that I would recommend. It has a lot to do with what Katarina and I were talking about in our breakout session is that there are some things, major messages we need to be sending to these kids right now. But all kids. And it's about how they feel about themselves in our community, how they feel about themselves. they know that they can do it. And how do we send those messages if they don't have tech? If they don't, well, we just have a bunch of examples of how we can send those messages and when kids feel this way and have some resources, they might just start reading. They might, I mean, or trying or reading in their native language. We have to realize what a huge win it is if kids read in their native language or read anything. So we have some more resources too for kids who don't have literacy in any language. And I linked to those as well. OK, Victoria said, during my pullout tutorials with small groups, there are several students who are embarrassed. I'll get this. This is huge. She said, so they're embarrassed and they don't want people to see their writing. And you guys know what this feels like. This is the typical student, not just the English learner student, a lot of kids, especially middle school for some reason, they care more about what other people think than anything. And we're trying to help them create a safe space. So kudos, Victoria, kudos to all of you guys for the things that you're doing for these kids. I can just tell how much you're bending over backwards for these kids. So she wants a friendly, supportive atmosphere. So Victoria, I would point you back to language experience approach that I showed and I put the link here again. If you co-create text with that child, basically, you're honoring that the child is the author. And the child is the author. The person with the ideas, they're the author. You're just the scribe. If you write it down, you're the scribe. People will hire you later in life to write down their words for them if you have good enough ideas. And to tell you the truth, I didn't write down all of this. I did a lot of speech to text. And somebody else, I have a co-author who helped me as a scribe for a lot of it because I was teaching and teaching is busy work. You know what I mean, it's heavy. And so I would just challenge you to think about it that way. These kids, they probably have pretty good ideas. I mean, all kids do. So we got to ask them some pretty compelling questions, you know, questions that really stir curiosity and get them in conversation. And then you can write down their words for them. And they're not gonna be embarrassed about how they're written because you have command of the English language. And again, we can go back and learn to read from that. And they're proud of that. And they'll read it over and over again because it's more high interest because they wrote it. So that's my top tip is co-create text with students and help them learn to read from that and then offer high and low interest things as well. And they're not gonna be that embarrassed until they're able to write on their own. Remember, it's an I do, we do, you do. So I'm writing for them. And eventually I'm gonna give them sentence frames and ask them to take more risks. And we're gonna believe that every day they acquire more language and more literacy every day a little bit more. So we just have to start right now. Sarah says, learner engagement with high upper high school kids. That free open reading time, it's super important. Free voluntary reading is super important even for newcomers. I really take offense when people say newcomers shouldn't be doing free voluntary reading because they can't. That's not true. Many of them can read in their native language and this is a very good activity for any literate person to do. But sooner or later they can read with support and they can read what we wrote together right now. Maybe not perfectly, but they don't have to figure it out. They understand it because they're the authors, remember? So I could put that with support could be I record it or it's on word and it reads to them or any audio book that you slow down and they read. All of these things are very, very important for our students because they need to have choice. They need to be in literature and they can do it with support. They can read with support. So I would say offer as much, she said any suggestions beyond the standard self-selecting high interest texts. Well, Sarah, that's the name of the game and let these guys self-select high interest texts. But I understand I had a classroom that was like a zoo and we could not even get to these great activities because a lot of the kids didn't have a background for even how to act in school. And then some of them were just middle school, good night. It's the fact that they're middle school, that's the problem. But anyway, I would point you to this episode with social contracts in it because that ended up being the answer for us is creating the norms for that time, for how to use your cell phone, for the class in general. We created all the norms with the students. And at first I thought they can't, they've never been in school. But I was quickly told by many teachers who are masters at this that kindergartners can help you make rules for the classroom. It's not about the rules of traditional rules or my rules. The questions you ask when you create a social contract and we're getting this from capturing kids' hearts, the flipping group is how do you wanna be treated? How do you want to be treated? And we spend a lot of time on that. And then how do you think your neighbor wants to be treated? And we spend a lot of time on that in any language. This is not about speaking perfect English. This is about getting, how do you feel that people should be treated? And then how do you wanna be treated by a teacher? And we all have to agree to him. And that is a living document that we go back to over and over again. But if you wanna see how that's done step by step, the questions and everything, I put the link right there for you. And also some testimony of other teachers talking about it. So that's my top tip for classroom management during these things. Shelter. Sorry, as you were speaking, it almost made me wonder, do you think that scaffolding with a read aloud where the teacher is kind of modeling, asking questions during reading, what might be a support to transition them into independent reading? I would say absolutely. And the place I'm coming from is that whole, I do, we do, you do. When I read it by myself, I'm modeling reading. That's the I do and all kids can benefit from that. And I get a brand new kid in May or March. I'm not gonna dumb this down. I'm just gonna counsel that child to relax and make sure they know they're getting phonetics and they're getting sight words and they will have an opportunity to negotiate meaning. Don't worry, just listen, repeat today and you will have a chance to negotiate meaning. So when I'm asking questions from this, like the next day I have another one, couple of days later I have another one. I'm gonna go back and reread because now I have a mentor text and I can do a lot of things with that season. I may agree. It's an I do when we do it together, we do and then they can read it later on their own but we can come back. And if you wanna do some of that language learning thing about conjugating verbs, we can change this all into the present tense. We can change it to the past tense. Absolutely, it's part of that gradual release. I would say, cause you could make the words even more academic, for sure, for sure. So sheltered versus integrated instruction. I think this was the last question. Like, can you shelter too much? And I would say no because what I'm doing for my side kids, for my kids with interrupted education, I'm being specific on how does that help all kids? So let's go back to the content and language objective example. I'm not gonna go, oh, they don't need this anymore because it doesn't hurt anybody for me to read it aloud. And it's John Hattie's work shows that it's benefiting the other kids for different reasons. It's benefiting all the kids. So when we have structured conversations using like Q triple SA, you'll see that across my site is question signal stem share. When we have structured conversations that we structured in a way where everybody is set up for success. It's not just my English learners that are benefiting from that. So you can call it sheltering but I'm calling it tier one instruction. And also my dyslexic kids, maybe they couldn't read the board either but when I track my finger under it, now they can. I mean, it's like universal design. What are you, who are you doing it for? And I would say we're doing it for all kids unless you have kids in your classroom that are all reading at or above grade level. And I never meet any teachers that have that even without the English learners in the room. So what are we doing to help kids get automaticity more and more? Cause more kids are fake reading and that's part of the problem. You don't get to be a better reader, fake reading. Oh, I didn't see this one. Sorry, from Roxanne, but I did answer it. So apparently I saw it. She says that she has a group of division to students that have interrupted education and they have very little literacy in their native language. They have limited experience with technology. Their skills are varied. They have primarily she's using balanced literacy. Is there value in giving them phonetic lessons and interactive phonetics? There are different schools of thought on how much phonetics to do. I would say everybody who doesn't know how to read in this new language that they're getting needs some lessons in phonetics. I just don't start with alphabet. That would to me now seem ridiculous because the kids are not in a low stress place when they first come. So we want them in a low stress place to even get a formative assessment of what they can read and can't read. So, and I'm gonna be coral reading with everybody every day and those children are gonna understand more English every single day. So I'm frequently doing very formative little assessments of who can read what. I don't stop everything and do big assessments but every day I hit about three kids while they're doing silent reading. I'm walking up and asking them to read something to me and making anecdotal notes so that I can see that everybody's moving forward. And then every once in a while I will give a quick assessment of who has what blends because by the second semester everybody's gained so much but I know there will be some blends that I'll want to do. So I think there's value but every child is different. So how much this child needs is different than how much this child needs. That's why I would never start everybody on the alphabet. We want to know how much they're getting, how much they can get. A good example is the CH blend. A lot of our Spanish kids got that because they have that in their language but our Arabic kids had it too. And our Swahili kids had it. And then some kids that had no literacy had the CH blend. I was like, how do they have that? And then they told me, it's in Snapchat. And I was like, Snapchat. Like I don't understand because I don't even know their world. I don't know their world. So how can I say they have nothing? iPhone has a pH blend and a silent E and they can all somehow read iPhone after they've been here a couple of weeks. You know, we have to, and we can use that and point that out to them. So I wouldn't want to start without seeing what they want to write about. This is the beauty of them telling me what they want to write about. Words like iPhone, Snapchat, stuff like that comes up in that. But if you're a content teacher, I would challenge you to, even with all your science kids, are they all writing a lab report the way you want them to turn it in? That might be an opportunity at least once in your science classroom to do a shared writing about the science, the lab and show kids what it should look like. But it's their ideas and the teachers describe. And the same way that we would do it before. But again, in content classrooms, I would challenge you to have just do key things. Sentence frames, your ticket out, your language objective, vocabulary. But I would have sentence frames all over the place because it directs thinking and structured conversations lead to gains in achievement over and over again in studies. So we're not doing things just for these kids. That's how I would answer the questions that we all put in the document. Okay, thanks so much, Carol, for addressing those questions. I believe that we have Carol for another five minutes. So if anyone would like to ask any additional questions, please unmute your mic and do so. And I'm on Twitter like all the time, too much, of course. And I'll do a show. I mean, if you guys have questions and I didn't address them here, send them in and it might make sense for me to do a show about that. I would probably have to go get help, but we have a great big PLN that could help. What questions, does anybody have another question? Didn't have to be about the book. Maybe what's going on right now. I have a question. Yes, who's it? Sorry, excuse me. Is he Vaughn? Hi, Vaughn. Hi, Carol. I was just, I wanted to inquire whether or not because we've made this transition to distance learning, can we expect that our language learners may actually decline in some of their skills like across those four language strands with reading, writing, speaking and listening? I know that our division completes annual assessments that assess the level of proficiency in those four strands. And so I'm just curious if, for example, there was a student that was demonstrating an extending proficiency in those areas, can we expect that by fall, given that we schools reopen, can we expect those skills to diminish because those students are not currently in a language rich environment and they are not receiving the targeted language supports as they typically have in a traditional setting? It's definitely a valid concern. I think everybody here is probably thinking, yes, I've got three teenagers down the hall that have every advantage. And I feel like we've got some slide going on for everything they were supposed to be learning. I mean, it's kids who are out of school right now, we're crisis schooling, we're not homeschooling. And so the other side of that though, and really it depends. I don't know what kind of environment they're in. I would imagine if they have no access, that sure they might not have access. So then yes, but there are so many things. I don't know if y'all have PBS up there. I don't know what your local stations are running. There are so many things. That's why I linked to things that kids can be doing with or without technology, with or without parents. Parents who can help me in English, a language rich home environment was never required for our kids to achieve language acquisition and catch up and pass up the kids born here. It's not a requirement. It's gravy, it's extra. I mean, it's wonderful. Don't get me wrong. It makes our job way easier. But we see kids do it all the time. Like I said, I'm gonna train the kids on what to do when they're not with me. And they don't need someone at home that speaks English to do a lot of those things. So I would say let's focus on what can be given to them now. If I'm worried that they're losing some English language, what else are they gaining right now? They're gaining a worldview, they're gaining perspective. They're learning about these biology things we could never teach out of a textbook like this about viruses and about geography and about it and so many things they're learning. Let's not pretend that kids don't learn. They're learning, they're out there learning. Some of the things they're learning, we don't want them to learn. I know, but the point is they're not racing. Like they're not just gonna sit till fall doing nothing. So we have to believe that these kids can learn quickly because there's nothing wrong with them. And if they lost a little ground, it's an interruption in education. And these kids, maybe not the first interruption in education, they may not be freaking out like some of the other kids and parents are. We don't know, we don't know. But I would say when you go back, look at an asset lens, look through an asset lens. What do they have? What we all had a common experience. We were all part of history. We're gonna have some major experiences where we're gonna be able to draw from. And if we train the kids, the first thing we need to do when we get back to whatever normal looks like is train kids what to do when it happens again. When this happens again. Because if you could go back one month before this happened, you do things differently. You would have shown them so many things. You would have just, did your mom has a cell phone? Does it even have YouTube on there? Let me show you some things you could do. You know, you would. So that's what we need to do when we get back because this isn't that, they can do those things whether we're in a pandemic or not, but we all, from a responsible point of view, we need to be training our students on how to learn without us. And then we need to step up and change the way we teach so that it is more equitable for them. The biggest thing right now is that it's not equitable for our kids that don't have as much. All we can measure right now is how much privilege someone has. That's all that we're measuring with grades or anything like that. So how do we change that? That's where our advocacy voice needs to be moving forward. And so I would honor what you're saying. Yes, they're gonna have some slide. A lot of them might. I can't say for sure, but I would say we could expect that, but we can also expect some things that we can capitalize on as well. There's some silver linings right now. Big time. There are silver linings. If any of those kids have access to technology, your quietest kid can come to the front of the virtual classroom because they have more time in asynchronous opportunities to get their answers together. It's just, it can be amazing. We just need to get to a point where we're not also freaked out and the dust settles and we get our bearings and learn some of this stuff. We'll have some great things moving forward. So I hope that helps. It does, thanks Carol. No, thank you. I just want to honor all of you guys and lift you up because even just teaching my trainings in a virtual environment, I'm getting ready to pull my hair out and I know it's not easy. I know it is not easy. It sounds easier than it is. It's not, but it's possible. And we are no different than the kids. The more we do, the better we get at what we're doing. And so just move forward bravely. You are these people in history right now where everything changed a bit and some great things are gonna come out of it and they're gonna remember you as the educators that stood up and did this. So go forward, onward. Have to go. Okay, well thanks so much for your time. We really appreciate you taking time out of your day to join us. And so we will see you on Twitter and follow you and listen to your words of wisdom. So thank you. We have a call-in show every Saturday. If y'all have any questions too on VoiceEd Canada, voiced.ca Saturdays around 10 or 11. I don't know, ask me on Twitter, but we're doing a call-in show. We'd love to hear from you guys. Okay. Thanks Carol. Bye y'all.