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What Happened to Ebonics?

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Turmoil in 1980s Oakland Leads to Continued Definitive Conclusions about Language’s Impact on Education in the 2020s by Matthew Bamberg Photo by Kiana Bosman on Unsplash The Ebonics debate has often been misunderstood. It refers to the dialect of AAVE (African American Vernacular English). This type of language is prevalent in the Black community and has also spread into popular culture through lyrics in rap music and similar genres. I be workin’ Yes, I be workin’ on this article. This can be defined as: I’ve been working on this article for a while, although not necessarily at this very moment. I begin here because using AAVE helps readers understand the importance of training teachers to use it in our classrooms. Before getting into the meat and potatoes of the point, AAVE is an important dialect and, therefore, should be treated with the utmost respect, especially when dealing with it as a teacher. Slavery was Brutal The history of AAVE in the United States began in the 17th and 18t...
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5 Great Free Resources for Online Learning in the Arts

Google Arts and Culture has virtual field trips. Library of Congress contains films and video of historical events. PBS Learning Media   brings you standards-aligned videos, interactives, lesson plans, and more.   New York Times Learning Multimedia to find out what's going on in pictures and graphs.  Smithsonian Learning Lab includes ways to develop your own interactive learning experiences-or adopt exemplars made by teachers and Smithsonian experts.
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Six Challenges for English Learners (ELs)

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Here are some challenges for English Learners (ELLs) with links for ideas about how to resolve them: 1. Academic language--for some of the best ideas look to Ana Chamot, as she developed CALLA , which is the Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach.  2. Idioms and figurative language--The Amelia Bedelia books are great for teaching idioms and figurative language.  3. Sound/letter correspondence-- Phonics is a great subject for teaching sound/letter correspondence.  4. Sequence of events--Teach the sequence of events using lesson plan for the Very Hungry Caterpillar .  5. Cause and effect--Use a multi-flow graphic organizer/thinking map   for cause and effect.  6. Inferences--Check out good videos about teaching inferences . 
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Common Core for Teachers

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World Cultures are the focus of the National Endowment for the Humanities Lesson Plans

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Angkor Wat Buddhist monument photo by Matthew Bamberg A good set of world history lesson plans is available from the NEH. The plans include multicultural topics that cover Asian history and culture . The Angkor Wat lesson is particularly noteworthy in that these ruins in Cambodia is the largest religious monument in the world.
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5 Photography Lesson Plans with CCSS Standards

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Photo by Matthew Bamberg Common Core? Photography? Are there CCSS standards that incorporate photography into the curriculum? 1. Documenting Learning with Digital Cameras 2. Portraits that Capture Character 3. Bringing Cuba to Life with Photographs 4. 10 Intriguing Photographs to Teach Close Reading and Visual Thinking Skills 5. Teaching Photography's Rule of Thirds
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Units on Mexican and Guatemalan History and Culture that would Align Well With Common Core

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Mayan Ruins at Chichén Itzá in Yucatan, Mexico Courtesy of Chris Newsome Looking for lessons about Mayan Civilizations connected to the CCSS? Harvard puts out a great teacher's guide, Magnificent Maya , and NASA puts out Calendar in the Sky that deals with the Mayan concept of time. Both would align well with the following Common Core standards: Grade 2: Recount stories, including fables and   folktales from diverse cultures, and determine their central message, lesson, or moral. Grade 6-8:  Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including vocabulary specific to domains related to history/social studies. In addition, check out the resources for the Magnificent Maya lessons  and a study of Mayan fables .
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Multicultural Poetry for Phonological Awareness and Reading Fluency

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Multicultural Poetry is also a good way to teach rhyming words. Also, you can consider culture with respect to poetry and read poems by diverse groups of poets. See  https ://poets. org /anthology/popular-poems-teach Teaching students multicultural poetry requires that they "develop an established receptive and productive oral language vocabulary, an established understanding of the concepts of print (e.g., directionality, the understanding that print carries a message), the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words (phonemic awareness), a basic sight-word vocabulary (i.e., any word the learner can recognize immediately and without decoding;  Ehri , 1995), and a growing understanding of how words work within the larger grammatical structures of language (syntax). Prepared with these skills, students can begin to develop automatic word recognition, or  automaticity " ( Helman , p. 182). Once they have these skills they can learn poetry as p...
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STEM Wildfire Education Necessity

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  California Wildfires Are Getting Worse. Why Schools Must Teach Fire Survival Now From science to social-emotional learning, a comprehensive approach is needed to safeguard communities from natural and man-made hazards Wildfire in the Inland Empire of Southern California as seen from the desert. Photo by Matthew Bamberg Communities in California and elsewhere have shown remarkable resilience in uniting to cope and heal after a wildfire. Yet wildfires will remain a critical challenge, especially during droughts. The future doesn’t have to mirror the past. To ensure a safer tomorrow, California’s education system must prioritize wildfire preparedness and mitigation as a core part of its curriculum. A New Interdisciplinary Wildfire Curriculum The current model of isolating academic disciplines is inadequate for preparing students to face the uncertain world shaped by climate change. A significant curriculum overhaul is urgently needed to equip students with the skills and knowledge t...
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Social Emotional Skills and Holistic Education

Holistic education focuses on students identity in order for them to become good  community members by teachers instituting appropriate  moral, social, emotional, psychological and academic goals for functioning as a productive member of society.  As a teacher, you have to consider what's going on in students' lives order to teach the students coping skills to deal with challenging situations. Holistic education can really help students who are falling behind. Creating engaging lessons that reach all students is the primary focus of planning for instruction in most schools.  You can combine this inclusion with extensive education in all areas. "All students will learn the skills they need to succeed across all domains, including social, cognitive and academic" (Schwartz as cited in Volk, 2013, para. 5). Students perform better academically when teachers address the social emotional needs of students Socio-emotional skills are for school, work and life. They inc...
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Writing a Personal Essay

Writing a personal essay doesn't have to be hard. One would think that the most important part of a personal essay would be writing a draft. This isn't so. While it is important, there are other parts of the writing process that are just as important for writing a focused "A" paper. One of the first tasks you do before you write the rough draft is to have a topic that is appropriate for a personal essay. As you may recall, a personal essay should be written in first person, usually about an account of an event, a story about a person, a travelogue of a place or  an illustration of an object (in words) that is or was special to you. Well, does that mean you should write about your mom, your childbirth (if you're a woman) or your vacation? Any of these topics are a good choice for a personal essay. Recall that the writing process: 1. Brainstorming--Create your topic. Narrow it down. 2. Outlining--Yes, this is necessary! 3. Drafting--Writing your draft f...
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