Today we had our last meeting with the ELLs. I brought an article on Africa that my ELL read in her geography class last week. We would not have had time to read the whole thing again together, so we just picked out the vocabulary words, reviewed them, and put them on our graphic organizer. It was a decent activity but didn’t take up enough time. We talked about her recent quinceañera, and eventually resorted to taking the graphic organizers we’d just made and folding them up into different shapes. After a little while of that, another ELL came over, presumably finished with his lesson with a different intern, and the two chatted in Spanish for the remaining ten or so minutes.
I felt bad about not filling our allotted time with educational content, but at the same time, I’d already overwhelmed her with vocabulary (about eight words, whose definitions we had to figure out from the context of the reading) and there wasn’t much else we could do with our article that we’d come anywhere near finishing.
If there were a next time, I’d bring a few different things that we could work on and let my ELL choose which one she wanted to work on.
