"welcome to another episode of the Equipping Ell podcast. Today, I want to talk to you about how to help newcomers transition into the school year in the middle of the year. Because, like I shared last week, I know a lot of you are experiencing an influx with newcomers, and that can feel even more overwhelming when it's the middle of the school year. And so today's episode is going to be short and sweet because I'm going to be sharing with you five resources that will help you get set up with what you need to be supporting your newcomers from day one. And these are things that you can share with other teachers in your building. Please use them and share them. Just let them know where you got them from or share this podcast with them. But I really am not going to go too in depth because you're going to find everything you need inside each of these resources. Now, if you have been around here for a while, I hope that you know and that you see how passionate we are here about empowering you to equip your english language learners. We honestly are constantly thinking and discussing, how can we make this easier for you? How can we help you to show up and be your best and provide quality and engaging resources for your english language learners? So, hopefully you've seen that in whatever way you've interacted with us here. But today, I want to just bring five of our resources together that we have created to make these things easier for you, to help you if you don't have ESL experience, but you're receiving ESL students in your classroom. That is what we're all about. We want to help support, empower you. I've experienced firsthand the absolute joy it is to work with these incredible learners. But I also know that when you don't have the right tools and guidance, it can feel really overwhelming. So, to combat that over, um, today I'm going to share with you five free resources that you can use to. Successfully help your newcomers transition into the school year. All right, are you ready to begin? And like I said, all these things are available to you. You can click them in the show notes and you can download each of them. You can share them, please use them and help other teachers feel empowered as well. So I hit on this last week, and this, I think, is a great place to start. And this is the newcomer welcome folder. The newcomer welcome folder is a variety of resources that we've put together that can all fit into one folder. And I encourage you to go download this, print it, and if you are ambitious to print multiple and set up five or ten folders at once, because you'll see that as you become familiar with these folders and what's inside, then all teachers can feel empowered to know what to do in that first day. I think when we can get over that first day and we can really have things prepared for them, it's so much easier for both us and for the students. But I really constantly think back to that first day. I had Joanna, my newcomer, and I just thought, I have no idea what to do and I have nothing prepared. There's nothing worse than that feeling. But with other newcomers that I later on had and when I had materials ready, it was such a joy and there was so much excitement in those students and an excitement for me because I loved that opportunity to know that I was going to get the chance to help the student begin to learn English. So inside the newcomer welcome folder, there are a few things for teachers. There's a checklist of things that teachers can do before the first day, during the first day, and during the first couple of weeks. There are also a few resources and materials for the students. For the first day, there is a little welcome book that they can color. There are some first week activities where they're learning basic greetings. They're learning basic vocabulary in the classroom. And one of the important things that's in that folder are some survival cards. And these survival cards have QR codes so those students can take them home and they can listen to them with their parents smartphone, and they can work on hearing English being spoken. They can repeat it at home where it's a safe environment. And it's really those words that are really crucial to just survival. I'm lost. Where is this? My teacher is. My name is things like the bathroom or things they're going to hear day in and day out. We want to really boost them with those words so that they can quickly start to grab on to what's being said and how to operate in the school setting as quickly as possible. We want to empower them with the ability to communicate in those ways when they need to. So definitely want to grab that newcomer welcome folder, get it set up. Like I said, set up multiple ones at a time so that whenever you have a newcomer, you already can be like, I have got this. I have. Folder right here. I'll pull it out, I'll put the student snapshot in there and we're good to go. Think of how different your day would be if you had that all ready to go. So that's number one. Our number two free resource to help you out is our go to guide. And we've really put this together from years of different things that we have done, different research, different experiences that we've had in the classroom and just seeing, wow, I do not know how to do this. And I was never told how to do this. And just hearing from you and teachers asking and saying, can you help me with this? All of these different types of things. So we've put a guide together that's over 30 pages. And this is really your. It really is your go to guide. That's what we really anything of this, I'm going to read through the table of contents so you can see exactly what's in it. But I think you're going to want to go download it and you're going to want to share it with other staff in your building. Because in this we have one where to begin teaching ell. So just that mindset piece. We have a culturally responsive quiz. So looking at biases that we might have, we have preparing for newcomers, getting set up. We have what to teach your newcomers for the first twelve weeks. And I'm going to go into that in a second with our next freebie. But that's just kind of a quick overview of different vocabulary. You could hit on different grammar skills. We then have ideas for scaffolds and supports for slife students. We have expectations for each domains.

These have been very helpful for teachers to know. For a level two student in listening, what should I expect of them to be able to do? So it really breaks it down. And then we have how do I know what they need? So it really helps you to look at where do I begin with these students? How do I know and walks you through that. We also give you an english language proficiency quick assessment. So how can you, on your own without any additional resources, run a quick assessment? We then share with you how to differentiate for each domain. Breaking that down, one of my favorite pieces to this is our if then guide intervention guide. So if you see that your El students are struggling with, they're not able to recall letter sounds easily, we then give you a few things that you could do to try to boost that. From there we go into one of our most popular resources that is to translate or not. And that's really meant to help you walk through a diagram that helps you decide, is this something that I need to translate or not? Because we have found that many times people think, if I have a newcomer, I now need to translate everything. And we know that that is not what they need. That's just too much work on the teacher, and that's too much work. And that's really not what is help for your newcomers. So we really break that down and walk through when it's appropriate and when it's not. And then we share some tips on how to cut your planning time in half. So that is our go to guide. We put a lot of work in bringing this all together, and we would absolutely love, if you want to share that out, if you want to share that on Instagram and let us know how helpful it is. If you would love to see something else added to that guide, please let us know. We really want it to be something that's robust and helpful for every teacher who's working with ell students, whether they've had ESL training or not. All right, the third freebie that we have for you is our WIDA aligned can do descriptors. And so what we've done is we have looked and taken a look at the Wida can do descriptors along with some other standards for language learners. And so we have broken those down into just in a very visually appealing way. Sometimes when you look at standards, you kind of fall asleep because it's very boring looking. It's just hard to really understand. How do I apply this to the group I'm working with? And so we wanted to make this as practical and useful as possible. And we've heard that these have been a game changer for many people. So we now have k through twelve available with these can do descriptors. They are broken down by language level and by domain. So it will say for reading second grade level three, they should be able to identify main idea in detail. It just really helps it to be super practical of like, okay, how do I apply this? What should I be doing with this group of students that I'm working with? What can they do? And so that's the purpose of those. And those have been really helpful. I know some teachers have printed them and laminated them and they use them to check things off that they've been hitting those targets. I know other teachers have printed them in black and white, and then they staple the language level and the grade level to a paper that's going to go back to the homeroom teacher. And they kind of tell them, hey, here's how you can differentiate this, or here's how you can target the skill in the homeroom classroom. So they've used it as a way to help bring in the homeroom teachers to get on with supporting their students with the material they're teaching in the homeroom classroom. So those are, now we have those available up to twelve. So k through twelve. Don't miss out on those. Those are a game changer. All right, number four, free resource. That we have for you today is a newcomer scope and sequence. So this one goes a little more in depth than the one that's in the go to guide. It really breaks it down into what topic you could teach each week, what vocabulary you could cover with that, what grammar skill, all of those types of things. So if you're just kind of feeling like, what should I do with these newcomers? We can walk you through with that scope and sequence. And that scope and sequence aligns with our newcomer bundle. Our year long bundle that has sold to over 4000 teachers have used it with great success. So if you are successful, Someone that's saying, I have newcomers, I'm really not sure what to do. I'm not sure what to teach. This, I promise will give you everything you need to teach them every day successfully. And it's fun, it's engaging, and it's not a lot of work on your part. So that newcomer scope in sequence, it does align with our newcomer year long bundle. So if you don't want to set up and do the work yourself, we can put a link for that newcomer bundle in the show notes as well. And then the last thing that I wanted to include in this five free resources is a set of PD slides all about supporting refugee students. And so I want to share this with you because I encourage you to do some professional development training. And I know sometimes it just can feel overwhelming to create the slides, to put the information together. And so I wanted to give you a starting point. So you can use these slides. You can just share them with teachers, they can go through them themselves. Or if you want to use these as a base and then change up some of the slides or make it more aligned with the students that you are working with, please do so. They are yours to use however you want. We just wanted to give you a resource that will help you get started with doing some PD in your school and helping share some information about what teachers can do to really provide the support when it comes to refugee students in their school. So, like I said, you can find all of these links in the show notes, and we really hope that they help empower you to equip your english language learners. If you are passionate about this mission and what we're doing, we would love for you to share and spread the word, either by leaving a review here on the podcast or by sharing it on a social media and tagging us at equipping ells. We love the work that you're doing. We want to support you as best as we can. If there's another type of resource that you would love to see that would really help you begin working and helping your newcomers transition to the school all, please reach out and let us know. We might just put that together and share it with you in the upcoming episodes.

Thanks again for joining me on another episode of the Clipping Yellows podcast. I will be back next week with some more quick tips on how to help transition your newcomers into a school year."